Prior to the pandemic, only 6% of employees worked from home, and about 3/4ths of workers had never worked from home according to data from the National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI). But by May 2020, fully 35% of the U.S. workforce had been sent home because of Covid, driving the total remote workforce over 40% and exceeding McKinsey estimates from a year before regarding the max percentage of work which could be conducted remotely. In many cases, these transitions were made with very little communication and with almost no training for supervisors about the differences between managing remotely vs. in-person.
These simple, unforced errors would turn out to be among the most significant contributors to what’s been dubbed the “Great Resignation,” a mass, voluntary exodus from the workforce of now 24.2 million employees between April and September of this year. And it’s a phenomenon that’s showing no sign of slowing down; September quits, preliminarily reported at 4.434 million were a record, beating the prior record of 4.270 million set just the month before. But for those who were already working remotely prior to the pandemic, like the folks at small enterprise, Kolabtree – a six year-old online marketplace that connects businesses and academics with more than 800 freelancing scientists and technologists around the globe – not only could they have seen this coming, but they could have helped many to avoid the critical errors that have led us to this point.
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