Due to the coronavirus pandemic, an increasing number of employers are allowing their workers to telecommute. While it’s true that some companies have provided employees with this option for years, the widespread outbreak of COVID-19 has resulted in remote work becoming more and more commonplace throughout the world. If you think that working at home is a new concept, you might be surprised to learn that just the opposite is true. Remote work has actually been around since the notion of “work” began.

The World Health Organization (WHO) just officially labeled COVID-19 a pandemic. And companies, schools and other organizations around the world are now urging their employees and students to work from home. From China to Italy; from the U.K. to the U.S., companies of all sizes are insisting that their workers stay home and telecommute to help stop the spread of the virus. Over the last several years, there have been some companies that continued to promote remote work, but in the end, it may be the coronavirus that finally makes telecommuting mainstream.

The recent spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) is a frightening reality not only for people living in China – where the pandemic originated – but all over the world. Pandemics are nothing new. In fact, they have affected mankind for centuries. Just consider the Spanish flu that tragically took so many lives early in the 19^th century. But a pandemic in this day and age can have even more dire consequences.

Burnout can happen to even the best employee. While burnout is hard enough for the worker experiencing it, it’s just as concerning for the employer. As a company owner or manager, there are several symptoms of burnout that you should watch for in members of your staff, including:

Striking a work-life balance is something that virtually all employees strive to achieve. After all, it’s an essential part of enjoying a full, well-rounded life. An employee needs to put in the hours required to do the best job possible for his or her employer, but that same worker also needs enough time to devote to family and friends, not to mention the time needed to keep healthy enough to juggle it all successfully. So it’s pretty obvious why this would matter so much to employees. But if you’re a business owner or manager, why would it matter to you?

It’s easy to get distracted at work. Other people carrying on conversations, annoying phones ringing, or even the normal white noise of any office environment can be enough to distract an employee’s attention away from work-related tasks. Several years ago, when access to the Internet became widely available to most workers, distraction rose to an entirely new level. But in recent years, technology has produced what is arguably the biggest distraction of all for office workers: the smartphone.

Recent studies show that the best employees are drawn to companies that provide them with more flexible work schedules, and that includes the ability to telecommute. Unfortunately, many managers are still reluctant to allow their employees to work remotely, believing that they would be more likely to waste time on the Internet, and that would mean lower productivity on the part of those employees.

Working remotely is becoming more and more popular among companies in many industries. But one of the challenges for managers of remote workers is ensuring that their employees are being productive on the job. This is precisely the reason why MySammy was developed to begin with. MySammy is a tool designed to help encourage workers to be more productive no matter where they are located physically. It is designed to provide quantifiable performance measurement information, which helps management to accurately assess how productive an employee is being while working on a computer.

CEOs, managers, directors and company presidents all have one thing in common: they want their businesses to succeed. Most members of upper management can quickly come up with a list of what any successful company needs: high profit margins, low overhead, and streamlined internal operations, for example. But there is one intangible ingredient of success that may not immediately come to mind for even the most experienced manager: mutual trust. As a supervisor or manager, you need to trust that your employees will do their jobs to the best of their ability every working day.

Locating, recruiting and hiring high quality employees is crucial for the success of any company, no matter what its size or which industry it’s in. That may become more and more challenging for some managers over the next several years, as millennials become the predominant working age group. If you remain stuck in a mindset from years ago – one that dictates employees can only be productive in a traditional office environment – you will be hard pressed to find millennials who want to join your staff.