Remember the days when we all were in self-isolation, working, studying, eating, sleeping and spending leisure time in the comfort of our home? That all-too-familiar comfort soon turned into cabin fever, and Zoom became this surreal substitute for real human communication.
Fast forward to today, and there’s still a lot reminiscent of these times – from people rethinking their values to employees switching to remote and hybrid work models. The memes of that time are also not going anywhere, like this Facebook group “Zoom Memes for Self Quaranteens.”
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Launched on March 12, 2020, the group started as hilarious source of memes and today it’s home to a solid 958.4K members. We wrapped up some new memes from the page that anyone who’s currently under a burden (and a blessing in some other way) of work or studying will relate to. Psst! More Zoom memes can be found in part 1.
Bored Panda also spoke with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, the best-selling author of Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage (Intentional Insights, 2021) and CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts about ways the worldwide pandemic transformed how people work, as well as the benefits of remote work for employees.
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Dr. Gleb Tsipursky explained that prior to the pandemic, the habits and mental models of work centered around a physical space belonging to their employer. “However, during the pandemic, the 56% of all workers who could do their job from home changed their habits and mental models of work to focus on the tasks they did, not where they did these tasks,” Dr. Tsipursky said.
According to the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, employees learned they can have much more work-life balance, less stress, more happiness, and more time with their family and friends, while still getting all their tasks done.
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When asked how remote work benefits employees, Dr. Tsipursky said that the large majority found they really like working from home: that’s why 87% of workers would want to work remotely for all or a significant portion of their time, if given the chance.
He explained further: “That’s because employees benefit immensely from spending time working remotely. They don’t have to spend two hours in traffic every day stuck in a commute. They don’t have to put on fancy and uncomfortable clothing, such as hard shoes or heels. They don’t have to pay for overpriced lunches in downtown restaurants.”
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Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.
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Instead, Dr. Tsipursky argues, “They can spend much more time with their friends and family. They can have better balance as caretakers of children or elderly, which benefits women especially, since they are still unfortunately the major caretakers in our society.”
Moreover, “remote work is especially desirable for minorities such as African-Americans, since they still face microaggressions and discrimination in the office, as well as for people with disabilities, which is why minorities have a much stronger preference for remote work than white males,” Dr. Tsipursky explained.
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While there are so many benefits that come from remote work, it’s no secret that many companies are still reluctant to implement a fully remote work model. Dr. Tsipursky explained that this is because of cognitive biases, which are mental blind spots that lead to poor decisions.
“Many leaders feel a desire to go back to the world before the pandemic. They fall for status quo bias, a desire to maintain or get back to what they see as the appropriate situation and way of doing things.”
Moreover, “a major factor in leaders wanting everyone to return to the office stems from their personal discomfort with work from home. They spent their career surrounded by other people. They want to resume regularly walking the floors, surrounded by the energy of staff working.”
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Another problem is functional fixedness, Dr. Tsipursky argues. “When we have a certain perception of how systems should work, we ignore other possible functions, uses, and behaviors. We do this even if these new functions, uses, and behaviors offer a better fit for a changed situation and would address our problems better.”
“That’s why so many companies are unable to implement effective hybrid work policies and are instead demanding that all employees return to the office,” Dr. Tsipursky concluded.
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Source: boredpanda.com