Current events accelerate remote working

Posted: 04/03/2020

Current events have spurred a huge amount of thinking and planning about how workforces operate effectively. Indeed they have accelerated a long term trend of flexible and more sustainable home and remote working.

This has resulted in a significant rise in the use of virtual meetings and demonstrated the efficiency gains this flexible working brings as everything from conferences to commerce is re-thought. Corporates are finding they are required to spend less money on office space, infrastructure and travel.

What began as a rapid response by businesses in China has spread to global hubs, such as Silicon Valley, as a policy to discourage centralised congregations while keeping the economy going.

Two of the largest virtual workspaces and productivity software platforms in the world, Alibaba’s DingTalk and Tencent’s WeChat Work, were overwhelmed by the number of users at the beginning of last month as the extent of the problem became clear and became a key part of the solution to containment.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are just some of the major corporations that have instructed parts of their workforce to work remotely, in turn surging demand for videoconferencing and online meeting services like Zoom.

Remote working is key to reducing the risk of daily commuter transmission rates and the benefits of telecommuting, including stress reduction, increased productivity, a wider talent pool, and better work-life balance won’t subside with the epidemic.

The emergency adoption of remote work promises to speed up the transformation in the way companies operate – leading to long-term changes in workforce behaviour, according to analysts including Roberta Witty, at research and consulting firm Gartner, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal.

Those working in the professional video production industry have a head start, particularly those able to edit video remotely with Blackbird as easily as if they were on site with their original material.

That’s because Blackbird is the only professional video editor available in a browser. Production staff can work with Blackbird from home on Mac or PC with all the editing tools they need – even on bandwidth as low as 2 Mb/s. It’s a genuinely distributed ecosystem meaning that remote production teams can access video fast from any laptop, making it immediately available worldwide.

With the current crisis very much a developing story, many more companies in hotspot zones will likely begin considering or enforcing home working. When eventually everything does calm down, we may just find that this global disruptor has accelerated positive changes in the evolution of work.