How Virtual Work Is Boosting Employee Well-Being Across The Board

Redefining wellness through remote work

The best way to invest in employee well-being is to become a fully remote virtual company.
 
During the pandemic, organizations across a wide spectrum saw the benefits of virtual work for employees in terms of physical health, quality of life, flexibility and mental health. As a result, remote work has been embraced by an increasing number of companies even after the pandemic. 

Here are the many ways being a virtual company directly improves employee well-being.
 
Becoming a virtual organization is the best way to support the health of employees across a variety of matrices. It provides for physical health by removing the stress, time and physical grind of a daily commute. For many busy professionals who commute, finding time to get to the gym, yoga or other physical exercise is challenging. By freeing up to 10 hours per week or more, this also gives more time and flexibility for employees to take care of their own physical health. For example, obesity is a major problem worldwide, but employer initiatives can have a major impact on addressing this, according to a recent World Economic Forum report.
 
Beyond physical health, a virtual company supports a holistic approach encompassing the whole person, including mental health. Mental health has become much more of a focus in recent years due to the pandemic and larger trends. Virtual work improves mental health by enabling employees to have a comfortable remote environment suited to their needs. Employers can address mental health by providing employees with safety, autonomy and belonging, according to a recent Harvard Business Review report.
 
Autonomy is another key factor in employee mental health. When employees can work in a virtual environment, it immediately boosts autonomy and empowerment for employees by giving employees the freedom to work wherever they like and wherever they feel most comfortable. It also results in increased trust and independence, which are factors in job satisfaction.
 
Monitoring where employees are working via badge swipes or other means doesn’t empower employees. Companies would be better served simply evaluating whether employees are doing their best work wherever they are. They are grown-ups and should be trusted to do their best work — that’s why they were hired. When a company monitors employees, employees don’t feel trusted or empowered.
 
In addition, closely related to autonomy is flexibility, which is key to employee well-being. Virtual work gives employees flexibility to attend to family members or important appointments and complete their work on deadline when it best suits them. Why should employees have to choose between family members and their work? With virtual work, they don’t have to.
 
Virtual work also promotes inclusivity, allowing companies to find and hire people from diverse locations and backgrounds. This promotes a more inclusive and diverse work environment, which is a benefit for all. For us as a company, it also gives us a perspective that people just in San Francisco or New York wouldn’t have.
 
Part of employee well-being is meaning infused in work. Employees today care about more than just their tasks. They want their work to have a higher purpose. By working remotely, it is proven to cut a person’s carbon footprint by more than half if done five days a week. That is a massive win, given that studies have shown that global climate disasters are inevitable by 2035 if tremendous change is not made. That is important for many employees to know that they are making a difference, just by working remotely.
 
Organizations have seen the tremendous benefits of virtual work for employees’ well-being. Employees like virtual work. In fact, 63% of American workers would be less likely to apply for a job if it didn’t include remote working, according to a November 2024 Reputation Leaders survey of 1,000 American adults. Incidentally, it is also a positive for companies’ financial bottom line and for clients’ satisfaction. A recent Indeed and Oxford University report found that companies with higher employee well-being tended to have better financial performance and outperform others in the stock market. With all these advantages, it is increasingly inevitable that more companies will move to virtual work in the future.

Curtis Sparrer is the Principal and Co-Founder at Bospar.