Remote work has become the way to work since the epidemic of 2020. It has become commonplace for many digital economy workers. This has increased the labour pool for digital economy work.
people from all over the world are realising that they can contribute to the digital economy work. Remote work has removed geographical barriers and opened up many new job opportunities for digital economy work.
It is up to the companies to embrace remote work and invite increasing participation from the available global pool of workers. Companies, that were forced into remote work overnight by the epidemic, have become used to the concept of remote work and managing them effectively.
Interest in remote work increased during the epidemic.
many companies in the business, finance, arts, science, technology and even engineering sectors of business realised that most of the work could be done remotely. There has been a tremendous increase in exclusive remote work jobs during and after the epidemic.
Geography is no longer a constraint.
The gap between rural and urban applications for remote work jobs has narrowed indicating that more workers prefer to work from their rural location and that the location is no longer a constraint to getting the work done.
these jobs are no longer restricted to a particular location. The demand has been particularly significant from rural areas and across borders as they saw more opportunities emerging when the work can be done remotely.
Impact of a geographically diverse workforce.
The main social impact of remote work and the workforce’s increased interest in digital economy work is the geographical spread of opportunities. This has the impact of reducing the need for city clusters or the concentration of such work in cities.
There is a tremendous shortage of digital economy workforce and this trend helps ease the labour shortage by making a bigger talent pool available. The digital workforce pool has increased exponentially to include the entire global workforce opening up doors for millions of workers who otherwise would not be able to participate in this booming economy.
This spread of jobs across the geographies also helps in making the local economy robust against any economic downturns. this leads to additional local jobs being created to serve these communities, besides others, Examples could include additional local jobs in health care, education, food and hospitality sectors to name a few.
Companies at the forefront of this trend can benefit from the first-mover advantage and can get first access to the talent pool. A geographically diverse workforce leads to a more demographically diverse workforce which in turn could lead to increased creativity, innovation and market share for the business.
Of course, companies have to rework their operations, communication technology investments, processes and practices to maintain the corporate culture in this remote/ hybrid work environment.
For the employees, the proliferation of remote work opportunities brings in more job opportunities. It also creates a big opportunity for companies to upskill their employees.
Many advances in the recent past, like the internet, and communications, have not succeeded in expanding the talent market. However, what has changed now is the social changes brought about by the epidemic. the norms around the way of working have changed. Companies are more willing to hire remote workers and more people are ready to accept remote work. This shift on both sides has opened up the possibility that in the future work will not be restricted to select locations and everyone across the globe can participate in the digital economy.
Who Gets to Work in the Digital Economy?
by Scott Counts, Siddharth Suri, Alaysia Brown, Brian Xu, and Sharat Raghavan
HBR 2022/08
R2G 