thriving in a changing environment
RESETTING YOUR WORK-LIFE BALANCE
Three Key Trends for Adapting to a New Working Environment By Eric Greene, CPA, CMA, CIA, CFE
O
ne night, after about six months of working from home, my wife jokingly commented as I was answering some emails before bedtime, “Are you working from home? Or are you sleeping at work?” After a quick laugh about the absurdity of our lives while dealing with COVID-19, my wife’s comment left me thinking: What does the future of remote work hold for all of us? How do we adapt to these new hard trends that are increasingly resetting what we know to be normal? As CPAs engage in more remote work due to COVID-19, the world and our profession are changing as a result of this “mass experiment.” Facebook has said that half of its employees may be working remote within the next 5 to 10 years. Square, Twitter, Zillow, and Shopify have informed their employees that they can continue working from home forever. Accounting firms and professionals are not immune from these new hard trends, either. Large accounting firms, such as PwC, are predicting that most of their employees will continue to work from home in the future, with “no set expectation of a number of days in the office.”
These trends are not only affecting accounting, but also various knowledge workers. Slack recently performed a study of remote work by industry — surprisingly, accounting and finance knowledge workers have more of a suitability for remote work, though they are among several other industries who are similarly impacted. The question remains: What must we do to adapt to the changing workforce and way of doing work?
Recently, a global study was performed by The Adecco Group to better understand the change in working environment views triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. In a survey of thousands of officebased employees, managers and C-suite executives from various locations, Adecco reviewed old and new attitudes and behaviors from recent working trends, revealing the following important insights that will impact how all of us work going into the future. I believe that as CPAs and
the journal entry | October 2020
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