As COVID-19 began to spread rapidly across the globe in 2020, many organizations moved their employees off company premises and enabled large "work from home" efforts. Nobody knew how long this would last, but we assumed we could work remotely for a few months until this thing worked itself out, then return to the office and get back to "normal." We were very wrong.
We weren’t just wrong about the length of the crisis; we were wrong about how our employees defined “home.” What we didn’t anticipate is that the pandemic would force companies to rethink the definition of “home.” Adult children needed to live with their sick parents to care for them. Travelers on vacation suddenly found their country in a state of lockdown with no possibility of quickly returning home. Younger workers chose to move back in with their parents to save on expensive rent and keep close family members in their “bubble.” Each employee had a unique challenge and a unique way of dealing with it.
While companies have been dealing with remote workers – even in foreign countries – for decades, most of those efforts revolved around known workers traveling to known locations under planned circumstances. This allowed an organization to carefully plan the process and technology needed to adequately enable, secure and account for these workers. The COVID-19 diaspora was different in that most of this happened without employers knowing about their employees’ location shift. They found that most people do not inform (or seek permission from) their employer before making personal decisions like where t ..
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