With the office-based working approach starting to diminish due to the Covid19 Pandemic conditions, working life has evolved to a different point and continues to evolve. It is observed that these changes have seriously affected companies and employees. Before the pandemic, employees who used to get up early and hit the road every working day can now work in the comfort of their own homes and with the joy of gaining the time not lost on the road… No, no! Indeed, this is not at all what it seems.
Particularly companies such as Google, Twitter, Amazon, Pinterest, Etsy, Best Buy, and Shopify, which are globally known and have a large number of employees, realized in the early days of the Covid19 Pandemic that the transition to working from home was not an advantage for employees. While companies’ expenses decreased, some burdens on employees increased: extra electricity, water, and heating costs; extra expenses and lost time in preparing lunch, tea, and coffee; lack of socialization, inactivity, “performance and productivity” anxiety… Besides all these, employees may face other problems like not having a suitable working environment at home or missing the working spirit in the office.
How can high motivation and organizational loyalty be achieved when all of this has suddenly arisen in working life? Here are the best examples:
Online Sports Courses
At the beginning of the transition to working remotely from home due to the Pandemic, Pinterest emphasized ensuring that its employees were not deprived of anything they had in their office in the past. According to Pinterest’s Alice Vichaita, extra attention was paid to continuing the most popular sports activities, which were thought to have an impact on the longing for a physical working environment. Online sports classes were held via Zoom and Hangout. Employees were notified 15 minutes before each session to increase the number of participants.
Another international company that offers online sports classes is Best Buy. Best Buy’s main motivation for offering this opportunity to its employees is to ensure that they feel good physically and mentally. Therefore, the fitness classes are designed in such a way that employees can also chat with each other. For those who missed the classes, video recordings were sent via Facebook and Microsoft Teams.
Setting Up a Real Office at Home
Shopify, Twitter, and Amazon are among the top companies that care about their employees having an ideal office environment. At the beginning of Covid-19, these companies gave away $1000 to their employees to have them provide themselves with ergonomic chairs and computers in their homes.
Tobias Lütke, the CEO of Shopify, wrote on his Twitter account that the company is essentially digital, not only due to Covid-19 pandemic conditions but also because he thinks office centralization is over. Shopify, which offered the opportunity to work both in the office and at home before Covid-19, emphasizes that the work culture should also be digitalized. Thus, it stands out as one of the institutions that prefer flexible working hours focused only on completing the work instead of classical working hours.
After Shopify took these steps in the first days of March 2020, other companies such as Twitter, Google, and Amazon also offered support for setting up a $1000 work-at-home work environment, but Google, in particular, earned a new negative reputation for not supporting its employees’ work-from-home expenses. It drew a great reaction by removing all the benefits that the employees had in the office environment, including the right to free meals.
The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, has been focusing on how to make working from home better, often emphasizing the importance of shifting away from a San Francisco-focused perspective to ensure that people living in different time zones can well work together comfortably.
Education Support
Amazon, which was in the spotlight with the various education opportunities it offered to its employees even before the Covid-19 pandemic, provides its employees with access to various Certificate and Diploma programs. It continues its Upskilling 2025 program to ensure that its employees advance in their careers and work in better positions by turning to different fields in their careers, if necessary.
It can be easily said that Etsy is the company that supports its employees the most in adapting to working remotely from home. Etsy not only offers training opportunities but also supports its employees in every aspect of life, like; as free psychological counseling and therapy, off days for mental health, and childcare support for parents.
As for the Education Support Providing companies globally, more than 500 companies in the world benefit from Cambly’s corporate English education program. This way, they have employees who can speak good command of business English and are also confident in speaking English. In addition, these companies can increase their employees’ motivation and internal loyalty by offering English training from a platform like Cambly, where only native English-speaking instructors are available.
You can contact Cambly Corporate Team to benefit from the advantages of online education while expanding your boundaries.
