The New Office for 2021: Home-Working, Side Hustles & Entrepreneurship

What does the typical office look like in January? Any other year we would be describing a vast building, break rooms, water coolers, and people talking, having meetings, etc. This year the typical office is much smaller, it perhaps has a fold-away single bed in it? Or it's a corner of the kitchen, with your desk shared with a toddler coloring in the corner. Yes, many of us are now working from home. What will this mean for the world of work? Are we going to see the possibility of new ways of working and take the opportunities they offer?

Home Working

Homeworking is much more of a standard than it used to be. This time last year you'd struggle to find anyone who had heard of a 'Zoom meeting'. These days, it is commonplace. We have even seen a whole new series of words relating to Zoom calls, my personal favorites including, "zoom-bombing" and "zumping". We are now used to using a range of software we were previously unaware of. I've been working via slack, where our team chats, submits work and monitors progress all from separate locations.

Side Hustles

Side hustles are ways of making money we do on top of our regular jobs, or more accurately, on the side. These can be as simple as taking on an extra job delivering pizzas or working at a bar part-time in the evening. But these types of side hustle are time-consuming and poorly paid. But with the opportunities we are discussing due to homeworking, there are far better opportunities. Look here at how to get free stocks, this could give you the starting point to begin a lucrative trading career. You can also make money by producing and selling items. There is a huge market for quality hand-made craft items such as clothing, homewares, etc.

New Businesses

What about starting a new business? There have never been more new businesses. The whole nature of the economy is changing and this brings with it new opportunities. People have become used to ordering online, having products delivered to their door. Also, media is consumed digitally, including music, TV, and film, even the relatively new genre of podcasting. All of these circumvent the traditional methods of delivery. This gives the opportunity of offering online services and products. Working in this way removes much of the barriers to entry that traditionally cost huge amounts of money. The digital world offers a far more level playing field and we may see a surge of new entrepreneurship and creativity coming out of the pandemic.

The Employment Market

We will also see the bouncing back of the traditional economy. As society opens up again, we will need more workers. Service workers, retail assistants, delivery people, and office workers will all return, and we will slowly see new vacancies appear to replace the positions lost over the last year. Even if admin and office work remains more tied to the home working model, and new hires will be made. It will be interesting to see new employees starting jobs where they may never visit the company office.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes