From “working from home” to telecommuting: this will be post-COVID work

Since the state of alarm was established in the World , many workers have been forced to work from home, which is not exactly the same as teleworking. Why? If you look at the country’s companies, some of them already had part of their staff teleworking part or full time. Others, only a few workers; others, however, to none. Nor did they have plans to do so before the pandemic.
So when the pandemic erupted, those who already had teleworking means and protocols in place have had no problem adapting, but the vast majority of people whose companies have never considered teleworking have suffered from adaptation.
The reasons are very simple. The difference between “working from home” and teleworking lies in perception: It is one thing to think of working from home as an occasional thing, for convenience, for example, during a snowstorm or Friday in the summer. The other is teleworking, which occurs when the employee is in a remote location full time.
So to speak, we should consider that remote workplace as a branch of the company, one more office, and for that reason it needs to have the same infrastructure and security arrangements as any other office.
According to experts, the emergency telecommuting procedures put in place by Covid-19 have caused a kind of chaos and security nightmares. The main reason is that hasty procedures neglected security priorities, such as the proper processing of RFPs for applications to be used remotely.
As work is done on these issues, the appropriate teleworking infrastructure materializes, and by the time companies return to business fully, many of the technological and security problems of teleworking will be overcome.
As the days go by, working at home will gradually become teleworking. Overall, productivity is improving, and by the time quarantine is completely over, by the time we get past Phase 3 of unconfinement, many workers will have become accustomed to the dynamics of teleworking.
This means that, for example, if companies chose to establish telework for 30% or 40% of their workers after this crisis, for workers who choose to do so, the daily trips to and from the office will have ended, as pointed out by ComputerWorld. Other direct benefits would be less spending on formal wear, for example, or eating out for work.
Also, those workers would go to the office only when it really makes sense, and business trips, meetings (which are sometimes too long and frequent) will be seen in the same way. They would always be done when they make sense. The post-COVID scenario paints very well for teleworking well understood, well planned, and executed, once we have overcome “work from home because of force.