Introduction. It is obvious that the transition to remote work is only a matter of time for many companies. This is especially true for companies where the physical presence of an employee in the office is not a strict necessity, but rather a formality. In a fairly large number of companies, hiring employees to work remotely was related to single specialists, most often from the technical area. With the development of information technology and the improvement of the quality of communication channels between employees, more and more companies began to think about transferring part of their staff to remote work, however, the lack of such practice and relevant studies in this area (namely, the dependence of an employee’s work efficiency on being outside the office) could become an obstacle.
The COVID-19 pandemic, among a huge number of its consequences, forced companies to transfer the vast majority of all employees to remote work for a while. Obviously, it was impossible in some spheres (sports services, catering, trade, i.e. spheres, which require direct contact with the customer). While many companies had to decide how to rapidly solve this problem - restaurants adopted delivery services, sports companies held online classes and training - some other companies were able to quickly switch to new working arrangements.
Although the strict quarantine measures were undoubtedly temporary, and sooner or later companies would return to their previous working arrangements, for some companies the experience of transferring most employees to remote work helped to reliably and practically test how the efficiency of employees’ work and their emotional state would change, what are the disadvantages of such work for specific companies, whether they would be able to continue working in this way in future.
Remote work provides a lot of benefits both for employees and for the company as a whole. The main benefits are shown in Figure 1.
Due to the “forced” transition to remote work, many companies were able to assess whether it is suitable for them. The first company that considered remote work so effective, safe and beneficial that allowed its employees to work remotely on a permanent basis [1] was the American social network Twitter, which has existed since 2006 and has about 4,900 employees as of 2019 [2].