“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ― C.S. Lewis
WHAT HAS HAPPENED IN JUST 10 WEEKS IS DIFFICULT TO FATHOM
The Pandemic that is Covid-19 has permanently altered the way we work. There will be no way to go back to the work-life we all knew in February – just 10 weeks ago. As of this writing, worldwide there have been 5,331,427 infected cases of Covid-19 and 340,566 deaths from Covid-19. The United States has sustained the most pain from the virus; tallying 1,645,646 cases and 97,663 deaths. Unfortunately, the daily cases are not showing clear signs of abating. In fact, the daily cases reported May 22 were the highest ever at 107,716 new cases worldwide (chart below).
The change in work behavior has been dramatic. A recent Gallup poll showed that the percentage of Americans working from home doubled from mid-March to early April 2020. The chart below shows that number jumping from 31% to 62% in about 3 weeks. Also, "Three-fifths of people working from home said they'd like to keep doing so once the crisis is over."
What does this mean for work-life going forward? With expectations of a vaccine not until mid or late 2021, but people trying to normalize now, how will companies and workers create safe and acceptable ways of doing business?
BIG CO'S ARE MAKING ANNOUNCEMENTS AND PLANS
In May, CNBC reported that "Twitter has said that employees have the option of never coming back to the office to work, while Facebook Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc., Salesforce.com Inc., and Slack Technologies Inc. have said they don't expect workers back in the office until 2021 — if then." It is believed that Twitter's announcement will ripple through TECH and many other industries.
Many believe that remote technology has proven itself in the past 10 weeks. "It's hard to not see 20% to 40% of our workforce be remote," Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told MarketWatch in an interview Thursday (5/14/20). We need to make real-estate decisions long in advance, two to three years, and are in the speculative conversation now if we have 30%, 40% fewer desks," Butterfield said in discussing conversations he was having with fellow Slack executives this week. "We may make the office more of a hotel."
"U.S. workers were 47% more productive in March and April than in the same two months a year ago through cloud-based business tools, chat applications, and email, according to an analysis of 100 million data points from 30,000 Americans by workplace-monitoring company Prodoscore." "I was pretty wrong about this. I thought productivity was going to plunge, but it has been very good," Okta Inc. CEO Todd McKinnon OKTA, -1.19% added, as the company considers a new dynamic work initiative. He said he could see Okta following Twitter's path "until there is a vaccine or a treatment."
"Some elements of this work-from-home scenario will not go away," Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said during a conference call with analysts Wednesday following the company's quarterly earnings announcement. For example, Webex hosted more than 20 billion meeting minutes in April, compared with 14 billion in March and 7 billion in February.
"The pandemic has created a permanent shift in the way people are working, and while not every organization will go 100% work from home forever, there will certainly be more support for virtualized environments," Vonage Holdings CEO Alan Masarek.
Of course, there is a stark divide among those who can and will work remotely and those businesses and, therefore, workers who count on NOT working remotely. The use of commercial real estate and public transit are likely to decline dramatically. Restaurants, bars, entertainment, sporting events, and gathering spots, in general, may be endangered. There will be dramatic changes in transportation. Will people return to Uber and Lyft or taxis? The use of airplanes, trains, and busses may decline, while the use of individual cars may skyrocket. There are winners and losers all along the spectrum.
WSJ/Marketwatch reported that "Gartner last week released results from a March 30 survey of 317 CFOs and business finance leaders that found 74 percent of those surveyed expect at least 5 percent of their workforce who previously worked in company offices will become permanent work-from-home employees after the pandemic ends. According to Gartner, about 25 percent of those surveyed expect 10 percent of their employees will remain remote, 17 percent expect 20 percent will remain remote, 4 percent expect 50 percent will remain remote, and 2 percent expect over 50 percent of employees now working from home to permanently work from home after the pandemic subsides."
The effects of the Pandemic will not easily be reversed and may cause an acceleration of a remote work trend.PRODUCTIVITY
As soon as technology (the internet and computers) became powerful and fast enough to make it possible, a lot of employees have been expressing the desire to work at home or, at the very least remotely, to avoid the time, energy, and expense of commuting 5 days a week. Employers have, however, claimed for decades that workers would not be as productive at home due to lack of structure, distractions, less interaction with peers, the difficulty in receiving consistent guidance from management, insufficient access to the necessary tools and system, and just plain laziness. Now, there is a possibility that new technologies (Zoom, etc…) and the Covid-19 experiment may have dovetailed in such a way to show why working from home with the right tools can be productive and provide balance.
Ravi Gajendran, an organizational psychologist at Florida International University, believes the Covid-19 experience may be an important inflection point in the debate over working remotely. "This is going to change the conversation," he says. "You'll have a larger swath of employees who are going to say, 'We did it then, we can do it again.' … And managers are going to find it harder to say no." He admits that for employees to really work remotely efficiently, however, businesses are going to have to reinvent and recommit to those kinds of systems, no matter what comes of the strange work conditions created by Covid-19. "Telecommuting is like any work arrangement or any work practice," he says. "If the ecology is set up right, the practice can be successful."
In addition to making workers happy and perhaps achieving the same or better productivity, there are also huge potential savings of remote working. Beyond the benefits that have already been observed around major metropolitan areas such as less traffic and less pollution, the savings to companies may involve huge office costs related to investments in land and buildings, rents, and energy. According to Global Workplace Analytics, employers can save $11,000 a year for every employee who works remotely half the time."*
WHAT DO WORKERS WANT?
Away from the stories about dogs and kids running astray through Zoom meetings and employees appearing half-dressed or saying inappropriate things when they thought they were muted, the Covid-19 work remote experiment has been more successful than most could have imagined. WSJ/Marketwatch reported that CEO Todd McKinnon OKTA, stated, "I was pretty wrong about this. I thought productivity was going to plunge, but it has been very good." The question is, "What do workers want?"
p>A Society for Human Resource Management poll outlines a myriad of advantages and drawbacks for workers to working remotely.
The table below shows that the best 4 reasons for working from homes are:
- Reduce commuting time
- Better balance between home and work
- Spending more time with family
- Flexible work hours
The most important drawbacks of remote working seem to be:
- Lack of in-person collaboration with colleagues
- No clear definition to the end of the day
- Homelife distractions and interruptions
- Eating more
https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-news/pages/poll-telework-coronavirus-full-results.aspx
Interestingly, it may be younger employees, who are possibly more TECH savvy, that have less of a desire to work remotely. They may want and need the face-to-face social interaction. Ironically, it may be older workers, who are less familiar with technology but have established families and social networks outside of cities and work, that may have the strongest desire for a remote work system. These people have more work experience and may be better able to be disciplined about unplugging at the end of the day and dividing their days into productive work units. More experienced workers may also require less direction.
