Someday, perhaps someday soon, when vaccination rates are high enough and the coronavirus relents, the world will return to normal. But in its wake, something as massive and meaningful as a global pandemic will leave many things different, including how we work.
In particular, knowledge workers — high-skilled workers whose jobs are done on computers — will likely see the biggest changes, from our physical locations to the technology we use to the ways in which our productivity is measured. In turn, how we work impacts everything from our own personal satisfaction to new inventions to the broader economy and society as a whole.
These changes represent a chance to remake work as we know it and to learn from the mistakes of our working past — if we’re thoughtful about how we enact them.
Here are 10 ways in which office work will never be the same.
1. Working from home is here to stay
Even after the pandemic is no longer forcing us to work from home, many people will continue to do so. That’s because working from home has worked surprisingly well for both employers and employees. People were productive and employers saw a future in which they were less tethered to expensive office real estate. And, going forward, many of the things that aren’t working — having to homeschool while working, for example, or feeling like work never ends because you never leave your house — will be alleviated when we’re not in the middle of a global health crisis that’s adding extra hurdles and stress to working from home.
“One of the few great upsides of the pandemic is we’ve accelerated 25 years of drift toward working from home in one year,” Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University professor who studies remote work, told Recode.
At the height of the pandemic, more than half of the US workforce worked from home, up from the single digits previously, according to market research company IDC. When the pandemic is over, those who can work from home will likely do so two or three days a week, according to research by Bloom and his co-authors that surveyed worker desires as well as their boss’s promises. This so-called hybrid work model, in which some workers work from home some of the time, will be the dominant office job arrangement. A smaller share of workers — 15 to 18 percent — will be remote full time, according to estimates from business consulting firm Emergent Research.
And there are measurable benefits to working from home.
Working from home allows people to skip their commute and can give them more flexibility in the hours they work, an arrangement workers are on board with and willing to put a dollar sign on. Bloom’s data says employees are willing to take an 8 percent pay cut for the opportunity to work from home two or three days a week. Remote employees save an average of $248 a month, according to a survey by Owl Labs and Global Workplace Analytics. Office management software company Envoy found that nearly half of employees said they’d leave their job if it didn’t offer a hybrid work model after the pandemic.
In short, the ability to work from home is no longer a perk; not allowing it is a dealbreaker.
Source: Vox
