Wondering how to measure productivity of employees working from home? While remote work helps employers reduce costs, it also offers a better work life balance to employees, who benefit from increased productivity. And with the current COVID-19 pandemic, transitioning to remote work has become the default option for thousands of companies. However, as your employees are no longer in the same office space, many employers are left wondering how to measure their productivity.

Working from home is a comparatively new trend that started to gather momentum with the advent of digital technologies. The previous five years saw a 44% surge in remote employment, which is explained by two major factors. The first is the growing mobility of the workforce, 40% of which are expected to go exceedingly mobile globally by 2022. In the developed countries, this ratio is likely to reach the astounding three-fourths. No less fundamental is the impact of COVID-19.

The global pandemic has left newly remote workers swimming in confusion and struggling to keep up. To shift from today’s state of surviving to a future where teams are thriving, we need tools that make coordinating and collaborating on work effortless. When teams aren’t clear on who is doing what by when and why they are doing it, they move slowly, miss deadlines, and fall short of their goals.

Moving is never fun. It’s bad enough when it’s your stuff, but ten years of stuff at an office you only spent two years in can be daunting! I’m Navid, and part of my job at Basecamp the last two years has been taking care of our office in Chicago. As folks outside of Basecamp learned of our impending office closure, I began to get some questions. The most common being “what did you do with the stuff?

Customer support reps have to be knowledgeable about the products and/or services their company sells so that they can accurately answer customer questions. They also need to be aware of company policy so that they always interact with customers in brand-approved ways. But teaching new team members these things when they work outside a central office can be difficult. To do so, you need a stellar onboarding plan.

In July, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) published a policy brief with some tremendous evidence-based information on potential productivity gains from teleworking in the post-COVID-19 era. First, four key themes from the piece — supported by data and evidence — are: We wanted to take a moment to give you an abbreviated synopsis of some of the more interesting, actionable findings.

According to figures, before COVID, only 7% of workers in the U.S. had access to a “flexible workplace” benefit or telework. Now, 64% of US employees are working from home now, according to research conducted by SHRM’s COVID-19 Business Index. This swelling of remote work is spurring many organizations to reevaluate their suite of business applications and tech solutions.

It’s no secret that remote work or telecommuting was gaining popularity in the United States over the past decade. According to one recent study, about 4.3 million people work remotely at least half the time — a number equivalent to about 3.2% of the entire workforce. All told, the number of people who work from home in some capacity has increased by an impressive 140% since 2005 alone — a trend that showed absolutely no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

Question for you: Do you know why there are so many different types of communication tools? I mean, just google the word “communication tools”, and you’ll find list upon list upon list of “best communication tools for teams and businesses” It’s because communication amongst teams is both hard AND critical to the success of every business. You would have thought we’d figured this all out by now.