Will home office replace on-site office?

Since 2022, home office has become a familiar way of working for many domestic enterprises.

Since the birth of this kind of works, people have different views on it. Usually, most people are not used to this kind of work. Many employees who work from home will make a hullabaloo about when they resume their field work. Working at home is too inefficient, and I feel tired all day. I feel that I have been given to the company for 24 hours.

Generally, everyone's views focus on the following points:

Agree: working from home can improve efficiency and you can work in the way you like; Working from home can save a lot of commuting time and work more efficiently.

Objection: Home office is vulnerable to environmental interference, and there are many interference factors; Long home office hours; The home office atmosphere is not as good as the scene, the communication with leaders and employees is too cold, and there is no intimacy and intuition of face-to-face contact.

What do you think of the home office?

Most people still don't attach importance to the home office. When they go to work, they go to the field office. Working at home will not be messy, and there will be no sense of ceremony at work. Moreover, the on-site office is a relatively closed environment and will not be disturbed by personal life factors. Enterprises spend money on employees' time, which means that employees are required to spend all this time on enterprise sales and marketing. If they work from home, who can guarantee that they will work for the company for eight hours, and who will supervise their work attitude and devotion?

Working from home is only a temporary plan during the epidemic, not a formal way of cooperation.

However, when discussing whether we can work from home, we should think about why we should go to the site in advance, which is the above reason.

The earliest field office originated from the rise of the industrial age. In order to improve the efficiency of employees, Taylor and others also put forward many management methods, such as division of labor. In the 17 and 18 centuries, work meant going to the factory, and the factory needed people to deal with machines, so it was reasonable to work on the spot. And since then, working a few hours a day has become the standard of work.

However, with the changes in the scope and methods of work, the cooperation between all employees and machines has gradually changed into the cooperation between people and things, and the ways of cooperation and collaboration between people are also constantly evolving. For example, people used to rely more on labor, and then computers appeared, and computer office became standard; For example, the original job required a lot of paper records. With the development of computer and Internet, software system has become one of the basic tools for many enterprises. The rise of telephone, computer, Internet, mobile phone and mobile network has changed our traditional way of working.

However, employees still have to punch in and out of work on time every day, but the working mode of on-site office every day has continued. Is this working method really efficient?

In order to work locally, many people spend a lot of time commuting every day, especially migrant workers in first-tier cities. Many people stay here because the income here is higher, not because the environment is better. They had to live in a small room and endure a long commute. The daily commuting time may be 1 to about 2 hours.

On-site office is good for enterprises because it brings people together. It's a bit like when I was at school, I asked the teacher to give lectures in person, but once the teacher was away, the school and the teacher were very worried about the students' performance. I couldn't believe that they could study consciously, even though this way was called self-study.

We usually think that people can work hard only under supervision, or that people can cooperate and exchange information only when they meet face to face; However, in recent years, with the rise of cloud services and online collaboration, remote videos and online documents of team projects have become more and more popular. Meetings are not always face to face. Remote video conference can bring hundreds or even thousands of people together, but the traditional conference method needs more manpower and material resources and takes up a lot of non-working time for everyone.

Then, the most lasting reason to support on-site office is supervision and concentration. I bought your time, and I don't watch you do it or send middle and senior leaders to watch you do it. So how can I rest assured? Will you be lazy? Will you fish during work hours? If everyone can work from home, how can we measure performance and promote work?

Originally, I didn't quite agree with home office, but recently I read some reports that working on the Internet at home and abroad, remote collaborative office has long been popular and has become a normal state. They think this method is more efficient and the actual implementation effect is good. At the same time, it also saves a lot of rental fees for on-site office space and facilities for enterprises.

I can't help thinking that when the Internet first appeared, many people thought it had no future. At most, it is for the country and the army. How can ordinary people use it? It's no use. Results Around 2000, Ma Yun, Ma Hua Teng and Li Yanhong created a large number of websites, which occupied half of the Internet in the next 20 years. When the mobile phone was launched around 20 10, many people thought it was too whimsical. We are all used to using Nokia, Samsung and Motorola, and push-button mobile phones are the mainstream mobile phones. However, Apple's touch-screen mobile phone exploded rapidly around the world within two years, directly forcing the mobile phone giant Nokia to go bankrupt.

There are many such examples. Wechat eliminated SMS and QQ, while Tik Tok beat TV, Weibo and video websites. Meituan take-out redefines the cognition of catering and take-out delivery. In the past, everyone only thought that delivery was either postal or e-commerce, and delivery in the same city was also based on e-commerce and logistics.

When many new things are born, many people don't understand them because they subvert the previous way of life or work. Subversion has always been the most common thing in this era.

So who says that home office is not a new working mode?

As long as this new way can improve work efficiency, solve the contradiction between work and life, and balance the relationship between labor and capital, then it will have a chance to become the mainstream.

I am optimistic about home office because:

1, saving commuting time, time is efficient, in essence, we have been constantly exchanging time for money, or spending money to buy time;

2. Select employees who agree with the company, and those who have been able to work actively at home are the people the company needs;

3. Redefining the cooperative relationship between employees, enterprises can take this opportunity to redefine and reorganize the working mode, adopt the project system instead of the original task system, and adopt the team system instead of the original departmental mechanism, which is also a reconstruction of the organization and relationship;

4. Remodeling the management mode of enterprises, how to measure work performance, how to train employees and how to manage employees. In fact, with the help of home office, you can provide a more flexible and humanized work mode for post-90 s and post-00 s, making enterprises more dynamic and fighting capacity.

Of course, when promoting home office, we need to solve several problems, that is, whether it is necessary for us to supervise employees, whether we should train employees or give full play to their abilities, whether we should mobilize negotiation or rigid management, whether we should cooperate or give orders directly, which may also have great changes in the structure and division of labor of the organization. How to evaluate the performance of employees and how to promote teamwork.

I make a bold assumption that in recent years, there will be some home offices, that is, remote office service enterprises, which specialize in operating and providing home office services, providing basic cloud servers, online collaborative office software, and most importantly, new management models and methods.

Once home office becomes the mainstream working method, the problem of overpopulation in many big cities will be solved. Although the scale effect is affected, because home office has become a reality, enterprise talents can come from all over the country and employees can live and work in any city, which will greatly solve the population problem and traffic problem in big cities and greatly enhance the happiness of employees. Living in second-and third-tier cities and working in first-tier cities. Of course, at this time, enterprises do not have a fixed office space. Usually everyone is scattered in all corners of the country. When necessary, everyone will get together for a meeting and then telecommute at ordinary times. This will also promote the standardized management and working mode of enterprises, and modularize and standardize work tasks.

Then in the next three to five years, will home office become the mainstream way, just like Wang Jianlin and Ma Yun's gambling, will e-commerce account for more than 50% of the real economy?

Of course, for many factories and service-oriented enterprises, on-site office is still necessary, but for most enterprises, we have been working and communicating online for more than ten years. Since enterprises began to use the Internet, computers and various software systems, they have been moving towards a new working mode.