A recent survey among professionals in the country found that nearly two-thirds of respondents expect remote working trends that were put in place due to the COVID-19 crisis to continue in the same vein or increase in the post-pandemic environment.
The ‘Remote Work in the MENA Poll 2021’, conducted recently by Bayt.com, the Middle East’s leading job site, and global online market research company, YouGov, revealed that only 25 percent of survey participants believed that the work situation will revert to what it was before the pandemic.
Currently, 24 percent of the respondents said they worked from home on all or some days of the week. While more than half the respondents (51%) said they would prefer a mix between working from home and returning to office, only 11 percent of the respondents said they would prefer working entirely from home.
The survey findings show that the COVID-19 pandemic may have presented Kuwait employers the opportunity to rethink the way their offices operate and on how staff work going into the future. Shreyansi Gupta, head of marketing at Bayt.com said: “Most employees crave flexibility after working from home for months, which is likely to transform a company’s culture, employee engagement, the way the work gets done and how office space is used.”
Some of the positive benefits of work from home underscored by the survey participants include saving travel time (51%), working in a comfortable work area (48%), reduced office politics (45%), and more time with family/ friends (40%). However, despite 9 in 10 respondents (95%) saying that they have all or some of the resources required to do their job remotely, only 35 percent believed that productivity and performance improved by working from home.
Some of the common challenges to work from home identified by the survey included separating work from personal life (45%), technical challenges (39%), isolation that affects mental health (39%) and frequent interruptions (36%).
For his part, Zafar Shah, research director at YouGov said, “Although the transition to remote work has been positively received by a large portion of the survey respondents, some have reported challenges. To mitigate this, managers should encourage intentional, effective and efficient communication at all levels of the organization.”