"Telecommuting" will be a hit in 2020, saving 14,000 people a year

During the resumption of work in 2020, more than 18 million enterprises in China adopted the online telecommuting model, with 346 million telecommuting users, saving 14,000 yuan per person per year.

Statistics

During the resumption of work in 2020, more than 18 million enterprises in China adopted the online telecommuting model and more than 300 million users used telecommuting applications, according to Ai Media Consulting. Now, with the effective control of the epidemic, many enterprises return to offline office, but telecommuting has become the regular mode of office for most enterprises, and even whether telecommuting will lead to the disappearance of offices has become a hot topic.

Social environment

Earlier, Ctrip founder Liang Jianzhang said that "now may be the best time for China to promote telecommuting model", it believes that the early impact of the epidemic, both enterprises and employees have gradually adapted to the new model, including supporting hardware and software services are also maturing, creating a favorable environment for telecommuting.

In fact, telecommuting is not a new concept, in the 1990s, with the popularity of Internet technology in Europe and the United States, telecommuting model came into being. D uring SARS in 2003, many Internet enterprises in China also opened the telecommuting mode. Among them, Alibaba because an employee infected with SARS, resulting in the company's more than 500 people isolated at home, for this reason, Jack Ma announced that the company is full of telecommuting at home.

In other words, telecommuting, backed by Internet technology, has been being tried, but the outbreak has allowed more businesses and employees to passively adapt to telecommuting.

Telecommuting or saving costs and increasing efficiency for your business is not suitable for all industries

Teleworking is effective

Ctrip experimented with telecommuting more than a decade ago, and founder Liang Jianzhang, in a paper co-authored with experts and scholars at Stanford University Business School in the United States, explained that when employees work from home, performance rises significantly, with a 13 percent increase in performance in nine months, due to increased effective working hours due to reduced sick leave and increased productivity in a quiet work environment.

The advantages of telecommuting

In fact, telecommuting does have significant cost and efficiency advantages over traditional ways of working. D uring the epidemic, most enterprises rely on "off-site office", "mobile office" and other ways to maintain the normal operation of the enterprise, most of the employees are in the home office mode, not only solve the problem of commuting, the daily free time will be greatly increased. At the same time, the dissemination of information within the company is more based on social APIs, free from the complex process of printing and handover in the past.

In addition, from the enterprise's point of view, in the telecommuting mode, enterprises can also save office space rent and other offline office costs. Studies have shown that telecommuting companies have increased their total factor productivity by 20 to 30 percent, while each telecommuting employee can save the business about RMB14,000 a year.

It is not difficult to see that whether it is the enterprise perspective or the staff point of view, telecommuting has certain advantages. B ut in the actual operation process, the disadvantages of telecommuting are beginning to become apparent. Ai media consulting "2020 Chinese New Year telecommuting disadvantage cognitive survey" shows that more than 40% of the office workers interviewed believe that telecommuting depends on telecommuting software, vulnerable to the impact of hardware conditions, nearly 30% of the interviewed office workers think that poor work continuity is easy to interfere with, and some of the interviewed office workers think that in telecommuting mode, the self-discipline requirements of employees are high.

"China New Year 2020 Telecommuting Disadvantage Cognitive Survey";

Telecommuting does not apply to businesses

In addition, telecommuting is not suitable for all enterprises, some enterprises if the use of telecommuting will make the enterprise less efficient. Z hang Yi, CEO of Ai Media Consulting, said: "Telecom is more suitable for those technical categories, do not need to collaborate in person, such as media, consulting, advertising, insurance industry, and so on, while the service industry, manufacturing and other traditional industries, is not suitable for this model." ”

But that doesn't mean telecommuting won't be available in every industry in the future. T he Harvard Business Review has pointed out that some businesses are currently struggling to telecommute, but with the development of 3D printing, automation, digital twin technology, and with the right strategy, organizational processes, technical support, and, most importantly, leadership, more businesses and organizations can telecommute in whole or in large part. Some large and mature organizations can also gradually transition to a hybrid or partial remote approach, and the question is not whether they can telecommute, but how.

Teleworking is suitable for people

Yuan Zheng, founder and chief executive of Zoom, an enterprise video communications platform, also said in an interview that with the help of video communications, thousands of small business owners, such as yoga instructors, piano teachers, therapists, etc., will be able to maintain and even expand their businesses during the outbreak by connecting with customers via video. In the near future, it says, some companies will adopt a hybrid work model: some will work in the office, others telecommute, and others will be completely telecommuting via video communications.

Telecommuting applications to the "platform ecology" direction, to help enterprises to digital transformation

User statistics

How can businesses better adapt to telecommuting? I n the early stages of an outbreak, this problem may have been a problem for many business managers. But a year later, telecommuting has become an important mode of daily operation for most enterprises, and the size of users is also expanding.

According to the 47th China Internet Development Statistics Report released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), as of December 2020, the number of telecommuting users in China reached 346 million, an increase of 147 million over June 2020, accounting for 34.9% of the total number of Internet users. The market size of telecommuting also ushered in explosive growth, with a half-year growth rate of 73.6%.

It is reported that in the past, telecommuting mainly refers to the regional scope of co-working, but with the development of technology has gradually become mobile office, now in the process of integration, open development, there have been a large number of third-party applications to meet the diverse needs of enterprises, during the outbreak, including Huawei Cloud WeLink1, Tencent documents, byte beat its flying book and other major platforms have provided free telecommuting support.

At the same time, under the normal background of epidemic prevention and control, more and more enterprises began to establish a more perfect telecommuting mechanism. D ata show that from the end of 2019 to May 2020, the number of users of WeChat services increased from 60 million to 250 million, and in December further increased to 400 million. As of December 2020, the number of nail enterprise organizations also exceeded 17 million, and between September and December 2020, the average daily use time of teleconferencing was 108 minutes, basically the same as in the first half of the year, making it the norm for enterprises.

Business survey data show that after the outbreak, the registration of telecommuting-related enterprises increased by 303% year-on-year. When the scale of telecommuting users continues to expand, telecommuting applications are also developing towards "platform ecology", and the personalized demand for telecommuting is gradually growing.

According to the China Internet Development Statistics Report, video or conference call usage was 22.8% as of December 2020, online document collaboration editing was 21.2%, online task management or process approval was 11.6%, and enterprise cloud disk was 9.4%, with significant differences in user usage for different segments. This also shows that telecommuting applications should speed up the opening of platforms, accommodate more vertical functional access, and achieve eco-interconnection.

New infrastructure construction

In addition, with China's 5G network, large data center, artificial intelligence and industrial Internet and other new infrastructure continue to accelerate the construction, so that enterprise-level applications of hardware, software infrastructure has been greatly improved, for the construction of telecommuting ecology to strengthen a large number of data processing, cloud storage and cloud computing, multi-program access and other key capabilities.

summary

To some extent, telecommuting software ushered in important development opportunities, especially during the outbreak, attracted a large number of users, but some people think that once the outbreak is over, telecommuting software may face the risk of losing "passively accepted users", and some people worry that telecommuting mode is only a "flash in the pan".

However, from the point of view of enterprise management, although under the epidemic, telecommuting is a last resort, but the convenience of telecommuting also makes many business managers realize that adapting to telecommuting may be an important step in the digital transformation of enterprises to resist risks.

It also means that teleworking will continue to exist after an outbreak, and that its value is much more than just dealing with a crisis, or suspending it but not ending it.