Will telecommuting become the mainstream way of working after the epidemic? are you ready?

Zhongxin Jingwei Client, March 5 (Chang Tao) You must have thought about it more than once during the weekdays when you have to take a check-in shift. If you do n’t have to go to work in the company, you can make money at home. Now that your dreams come true, are you really happy?

Affected by the new crown pneumonia epidemic, starting February 3, many companies were forced to choose online remote offices. The huge demand instantly exploded the remote office market. According to data provided by Dingding, on February 3, tens of millions of enterprises and nearly 200 million people worked from home. As of press time, four of the top ten free apps in the Apple App Store are for remote office or remote classroom applications.

A few days ago, Academician Zhong Nanshan expressed his confidence that China would basically control the epidemic by the end of April. So, after the epidemic, will telecommuting become the mainstream way of working? Will the confusion of telecommuting continue during the epidemic?

Photo by Changtao Xin Jingwei

Telecommuting is hot

On February 3, the first day of the resumption of work online, a white-collar worker in Beijing, Jiangxi's hometown, wore pajamas and participated in a department video conference. The main content of this video conference is to arrange home work arrangements. Shine's department has never held a video conference, and even the Nail App used to start the video conference was registered only the day before.

Due to the impact of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, there are not a few people who require employees to work flexibly and work from home like Shining Company, which has really stimulated the demand for remote work.

Shine probably didn't expect that on February 3, there were nearly 200 million people working from home like her. The huge influx of traffic has even caused mobile office applications such as Dingding and WeChat to malfunction.

Dingding said that on February 3, tens of millions of enterprises and nearly 200 million people worked from home. At 9:00 in the morning, the video conference function of Dingding ushered in a historical traffic peak, causing short-term traffic restrictions on the network. Corporate WeChat also claims that millions of companies across the country use corporate WeChat online offices. In the morning, the number of corporate WeChat conference function visits surged, and there was a temporary flow restriction.

Facing the huge market demand, the giants have aimed at the new battlefield of mobile office. In order to attract new users in the epidemic, Dingding, Tencent Conference, ByteDance Feishu, and Huawei Cloud WeLink all launched various free services in late January. According to Huawei Cloud, on the 2nd of February, 15,000 enterprises newly opened WeLink. On the following week, the average number of newly opened enterprises increased by 50% on an average day. The growth of users mainly came from Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Sichuan, Guangdong and other places.

Huawei Cloud said that since January 25, they need to support more than 10,000 meetings per day, on January 31, they have supported 50,000 meetings, and on February 2, they rose to 80,000.

According to Aurora Big Data, from January 1st to February 21st, daily active users rose from 26.1 million to 150 million; corporate WeChat rose from 5.62 million to 13.74 million; flying books rose from 79,500 to 250,000; Huawei The office application WeLink launched at the end of last year rose from 76,500 to 183,000.

As of press time, in the Apple App Store, Dingding is ranked first in the business category download list, enterprise WeChat third, Huawei WeLink 11th, and Feishu 13th.

Working from home is not as happy as you think

In this so-called "longest Spring Festival holiday in the history", remote office really refreshed some people. After all, you don't have to get up early to wash your hair and make up, and you don't have to squeeze in the morning and evening peaks. However, there are also a considerable number of employees who find working from home "very tired".

Yun Yi, a mother of two and a half years old, complained to reporters from China and Singapore about the "worry" of working remotely from home.

"Because of my job, I must keep an eye on the news in the group. But as long as I sit down in front of the computer, my daughter will cry and let me hug her. The family does not seem to understand me very well, they think that since I am at home, I should accompany my child and didn't realize that I had already started work. "Yiyi said that in addition to the influence of children, telecommuting also greatly lengthened working hours. "Leaders or colleagues will be online at any time. There is no concept of getting off work. And there are more phone or video conferences, and major events and small things must be pulled into a conference call. Sometimes the conference call is still open at 9 pm, and the communication efficiency is not high. It's really exhausting. "

In addition to the challenges from the home environment, some companies have made specific requirements for employees to work remotely, which has caused some employees to hate them. For example, some employees voiced on social media, and the company required them to turn on the camera during online meetings; some employees vowed to be fined for wearing pajamas and not washing their hair when they started video conferences; and employees complained that the company required four times a day to punch in.

Telecommuting is also prone to work errors due to inconvenient communication. On February 3, Sogou input method suddenly pushed a warning message about the magnitude 12 earthquake to more than 5,000 users in Xinglong County, Hebei Province. Later, Sogou found out that the reason was that during the technical test, due to the remote working of the relevant personnel at home, the server made an incorrect operation.

Will telecommuting become the mainstream way of working?

China Merchants Securities believes that the new crown pneumonia epidemic is likely to lead to the acceleration of domestic enterprise information construction. In the United States, as of 2017, more than 80% of enterprises have introduced remote working systems, and about 30 million people have been working remotely from home, accounting for 16% -19% of the working population in the United States. In China, there were only 3.6 million employees working remotely in 2014. In 2017, the market size of China's remote office reached 6 billion yuan, an increase of 68.07% year-on-year, and the potential is huge.

Pacific Securities believes that remote office is not a flash in the pan, and the business model and technical direction are sustainable. As the epidemic continues, the consumer habits of temporary customers will strengthen or even solidify.

Xie Xin, the vice president of ByteDance and the head of Feishu, said in an interview with the media that more and more companies are now working as office tools, further explaining that everyone is increasingly aware of the importance of tools to an enterprise.

As for how office applications change the way of working, Xie Xin said that so far, I have not heard of any large company in the world completely adopting the home office model, but byte beating employees, whether they are in the company or not, are indeed correct. The impact of work is not too great.

Pan Helin, Executive Dean of the Digital Economics Research Institute of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, analyzed the client of Sino-Singapore Jingwei, and the epidemic situation "acquainted" the telecommuting market to a certain extent, making users quickly develop habits. "The convenience of telecommuting is obvious. Even if there is no epidemic, it will become the mainstream way of working in the future. For some problems caused by remote office not being restricted by time and space, it can also be restricted by company rules and regulations. In other scenarios Remote office reduces the time cost of communication, and the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. "Pan Helin believes.

Internet analyst Ma Jihua told the Sino-Singapore Jingwei client that the necessity and feasibility of remote work were verified during the epidemic. Nowadays, habits have taken shape. With the popularization of 5G networks in the future, the utilization rate will definitely increase significantly, and the use time will also increase.

As for the current problems of telecommuting, Ma Jihua believes: "In the future, 5G technology is to liberate the constraints of time and space. As for the issue of separation of work and life, this is not a technical issue. In essence, telecommuting is still using tools and mastering the initiative. Rights are still people. "

However, there are also opinions that there are still many "mistaken points" in telecommuting. For example, telecommuting has not really improved efficiency, and the requirements for the professionalism and professional ability of each employee are extremely high. The above point of view is that after the telecommuting epidemic, many communication and meeting scenes will be restored to the opposite side of the line. Working online has become a necessity. (Zhongxin Jingwei APP)

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