It is not clear exactly what proportion of China’s workforce was permitted to telecommute before COVID-19 emerged, however, prior to the pandemic and according to the 2019 IWG Global Workspace Survey, 51% percent of businesses in China said they had a flexible workspace policy.
However, with the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic in the early months of 2020, China became the first country to embark on the largest work-from-home (WFH) experiment ever conducted.
As remote work morphs from a quick fix into a potentially permanent solution, businesses need a playbook. This is not a binary choice between a central office and a kitchen table – it is about flexible work, and arming leaders with tactics to determine what should be left behind, and what could ensure long-term success.
China found itself in the uneasy position of being first in attempting to reconfigure the traditional working paradigm, so it makes fitting sense for the rest of the world to take note as they move forward into ‘the new normal’.