The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many employees to work from home, and the magnitude of the shift to remote work is staggering. Before the pandemic, about 15% of U.S. employees were working from home at least some of the time. During the first half of April, half of U.S. employees were doing all of their work remotely.
This rapid shift has surfaced challenges with remote work that may have escaped people’s notice when the practice was more limited in scope. To understand these challenges, we conducted two surveys in April. During the first half of the month, we surveyed 441 global HR leaders, asking about the most pressing issues they were facing during the COVID-19 pandemic, what actions they had taken, and what had worked well in their organizations. Several of their top concerns — protecting the health and well-being of employees (listed by 22% of all respondents), preserving jobs (12%), and complying with government regulations (6%) — reflected the challenges of dealing with the public health crisis and economic downturn.
Many of the most frequently cited issues, however, stemmed from the abrupt surge in remote work. One-fifth of all HR leaders mentioned the general challenge of transitioning from onsite to remote work, and others listed specific concerns, including keeping remote employees engaged (17%), productive (7%), and connected (5%).
Widespread remote work has created new challenges, but the good news is that organizations around the world are experimenting with creative solutions to these problems. To learn more about these experiments and which ones are working, we conducted a second survey focused on the transition to remote work in the second half of April. The COVID-19 Pulse of HR platform is an interactive site that can crowdsource organizational experiments in real time. To prioritize which approaches are most promising, we used an interface developed by Waggl that displays a series of side-by-side comparisons of answers and lets users vote so that the most popular suggestions climb up the leaderboard.