The Rise of Digital Transformation And Remote Working

The new global work movement is on the rise, riding on the wave of digital transformation. Combined with the hardships of the lockdown and social distancing, it has certainly pushed workers to embrace remote working. But as the COVID-19 crisis persisted, it catalysed the digital working platforms and video conferencing applications. The pandemic changed the way we work overnight, it is the new normal that we are looking at. Let’s see how far it has gone!

Working Without Borders

Big tech companies have gradually revolutionised the traditional working system and realised the benefits of flexible working policy. But in almost all industries, companies are very likely to gain from the virtual working practices. Hiring the best talent is a key to a successful company which can be achieved by different online employment platforms. The best international remote workers are now not restricted to a specific region or country. The companies are free to embrace diversity by recruiting talent from different cultural, socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds.

A Gig Economy Boom: Upwork and Fiverr

Not only are the companies recognizing the advantages of remote working, the Generation Z workforce who grew up with the internet, they demand flexible working schedules and work-life balance as well. Take the statistic from LinkedIn as an example, one of the biggest employment-oriented online services, the percentage of paid job listings in 2020 skyrocketed 457% from the year prior, which is equivalent to 9 million job postings in the U.S. Meanwhile, Estonia, a small Eastern European nation, has witnessed an unprecedented growth in remote workers from 3.8% to 12.5% in the past 10 years.

With such a high demand on digital nomads, the freelancer marketplace Upwork was ahead of the game and filed to go public on Nasdaq back in 2018. A digital nomads heaven recruited 1.8 million freelancers in early 2020. In the same year, Upwork reported quarterly sales of US$87.53 million and growing at around 38% each year. A new rating indicates Upwork is outpacing 96% of stocks in the market. In the meantime, Upwork’s strong competitor, Israel-based Fiverr has to catch up with the game by going public and raising around US$111 million in 2019. The stock jumped 18% in the last month and over 50% of the predicted sales growth in this quarter. It showcased a gig economy boom across the continent.

Video Conferencing Is The New Normal

To build up the remote and globalized working models, video conferencing software is the backbone of the whole system. International corporations with global workforce are the initial adopters of video conferencing applications to facilitate employee communication. In the chaotic situation of 2020, there is a strong need to create a cost-effective, interface-friendly, multi-pronged video teleconference service. Conferencing apps such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet have witnessed the rise of global digitisation within a couple of months. Favored by the new working culture, a recent report conducted by Grand View Research, Inc. assumes that the global video conferencing market size will reach US$9.95 billion by 2028. The optimism of video conferencing adoption drives the market growth further.

Despite the difficult reality of the on-going pandemic, the world has progressively gone digital. This notion of adopting digital transformation technology helps us to maintain a certain degree of normality in our working routine. In the age of the new normal, we keep looking for challenges and opportunities.