Remote collaboration among teams is on the rise. Not just exclusively among teams of developers or designers anymore, but in organizations and companies that span the spectrum of industries. In turn, the growth of remote work has been generating new, unique experiences for employees and employers.
Since we at MURAL are a mixed, or distributed, team, we naturally wanted to find out more about the trend. In fact, it’s because our team is spread across continents and time zones, and because we experience firsthand the joys and pain points of remote collaboration, that we are such advocates for it.
But to better serve our users, we were curious about others' experiences working remotely. What are their joys or pain points, for example? How distributed are they? And ultimately, what can we do to make their virtual collaboration easier? We polled people across various industries to learn more.
Here’s a look at some of what we learned about remote work trends in 2016*:
- Almost a quarter of workers collaborate remotely on a regular basis
- 15% of everyone who participated work completely remote
- More than half cited less time commuting as the primary benefit
- The greatest frustrations included the lack of a social component or spontaneity
- 40% reported that the quality of their work did not suffer
*Based on survey results from 137 respondents.
Overall, we learned that literally everyone’s work stream involves remote collaboration at one point or another-- a trend that doesn’t show signs of slowing. Ultimately that means our job is to continue reducing the frustration associated with remote collaboration and increasing the benefits.
To get started, you can check out these 5 tactics for facilitating remote collaboration.
Or, if you already use MURAL, try these 5 steps to introduce new collaborators.
You can also head over to our results from last year, and see how they compare!
