COVID-19 for better or worse has challenged the conventional working environment.
Forcing employees who spend 1 or even 2 hours a day travelling to and from the city or main business districts, to stay and work from home. Forcing people to sleep in till about 8 am in opposition to waking up at 6 am to catch jam-packed Australian public transport, that often experiences delays. And which has forced us to have a little bit more time at the end of our day, each day and not just the weekends making us that much more productive at our work.
For years allot of the digital community have embraced working from home, not just because IT Contractors, designers and freelancers tend to work all hours of the day but more so because there is no longer the need to rent expensive office space or wasting valuable time commuting. Being cost-effective is one of the biggest advantages of working remotely.
The COVID-19 crisis will now force larger corporations to reexamine their working environment. The availability of high-speed internet connections, advanced communication applications and access to state of the art portable working devices such as laptops and iPads, has made the transition of working from home to working remotely much easier than what it might have been even a decade ago. A business will seriously consider asking their employees to work from home vs returning to large expensive office spaces, dominantly because this will be cheaper in terms of operating costs, and in time they might find their working staff allot more productive as they are less stressed.
This is how the communications landscape might shift over the next few years, post COVID-19. More people will shift/opt to work remotely vs commuting to busy city centres. More businesses will opt for skilled individuals who are able to manage their time more efficiently to work autonomously from home-based offices. This, in turn, will increase our dependency on the internet driving increasing demand in information technology services and computer devices.