Tag Archives: covid-19

The Future of the Office

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The Covid-19 pandemic and the resultant lockdown has led to the vast majority of office workers working from home since the end of March. At the time of writing, the UK Government has just announced it will be dropping its “work at home if you can” guidance to something that reflects Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s frequent encouragement to “get Britain back to work”. This is therefore a good time to reflect on the pros and cons of home working and to what extent the recent dramatic changes we have seen in working practices may become permanent.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently grabbed the headlines with his prediction that up to half of Facebook’s 45,000-strong workforce could be permanently working from home in the next five to ten years

Whilst we might expect the likes of Facebook and Zuckerberg to be ahead of the curve when it comes to innovation, there will be many less well-known businesses outside of the world of technology that have discovered, perhaps unexpectedly, the business benefits of having staff work at home during lockdown and who will be wondering to what extent these can be embedded as the economy returns to normal. The benefits of home working for businesses are usually cited as employees who are able to have a better work/life balance being happier and more productive and the ability of companies to access a broader and more diverse pool of talent. There will be many managers and business owners who have been pleasantly surprised by how productive their remote work force has been, reflecting a longstanding view that people working from home are not really working. Furthermore, there are many workplaces in which being present in the office, often for very long hours, is an essential prerequisite for career advancement. The widespread adoption and acceptance of video meeting technology such as Skype, Zoom and Microsoft Teams has meant that fears on the part of employees that by working at home they are “out of sight and out of mind” need no longer apply.

However, at the end of the day what may have more sway with company Finance Directors than these “human” considerations are the very real cost savings that can potentially be achieved by moving all or part of the workforce to home working – for either all or part of the week – on a permanent basis. In addition to allowing for social distancing considerations as part of the “new normal”, many businesses may find that having just 20% of the workforce in the office on each day of the week will allow them to significantly reduce their office space requirements whilst allowing for the resumption of some of the social contact that many workers value as part of office life as well as those meetings that, for whatever reason, do not lend themselves to being held online.

There is also evidence that whilst some workers are enjoying the remote working experience. For those with a dedicated home office space and a garden in which to work or enjoy breaks, it has been an overwhelmingly positive experience; others, whose working environment is far from ideal or who crave the social interactions of office life are increasingly desperate to return to business as usual.

In addition to the benefits, or otherwise, to individuals and employers, there are a number of societal benefits that accrue from a long-term shift towards remote working. On a global level, the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the lower number of vehicle movements due to there being fewer commuters are potentially significant as, on a more local level, are the associated reductions in road congestion and improvements in air quality. In the short term, these have been offset to some extent by an increase in the number of people choosing to commute by car rather than public transport due to concerns over social distancing and the risk of infection. Government investment in schemes to encourage walking and cycling will further reinforce these positive changes as well as leading to improvements in public health including  reduction in obesity levels as people become more active.

At the end of the day, it is likely that the future will herald a middle way between the extremes of business as usual and the lockdown situation of 100% home working. Just as there are both advantages and disadvantages for employees to working at home, there are good reasons why businesses might prefer to have staff in the office for at least some of the time.

Of course, business often extends beyond the doors of the office to include meetings in locations at a distance from HQ. Whilst there have been many benefits to having all meetings take place on Zoom, etc – savings on travel time and cost, venue hire and catering, as well as the wider benefits concerning emissions, congestion and air quality – there will always be some meetings that are just better done face-to-face. Similar considerations apply to conferences and training courses – whilst holding these online brings all the benefits noted above as well as the ability for conference delegates to attend only those sessions that really interest them and be in the (virtual) office the rest of the time, as opposed to the hotel bar, it is hard to replicate those chance meetings and conversations that take place outside the main auditorium or training room over lunch, in the coffee queue or waiting for the lift where contacts are made and business cards exchanged.

Looking to the future, it is likely that a new paradigm of office work will emerge with more employees being based at home for part of the week but travelling to the office on a regular basis. The Government is actively working to address one barrier to this, which is to make season tickets for public transport more flexible in order to accommodate this new way of working. Although the Government has announced that it hopes to end social distancing by Christmas, it is likely that employers will want to factor the possibility of renewed restrictions being imposed in the future into their workspace planning.

The impact that Coronavirus has had on the national psyche means that the office workforce as a whole has a unique opportunity to renegotiate the contract with employers regarding expectations about how and where office work will be performed. The prize for getting this renegotiation right is an extensive package of benefits for employees, businesses and wider society. As has been said on so many occasions during this crisis: there cannot be a return to business as usual but a transition to a new normal.

 

 

Pandemic 1 – How Did We Get Here?

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The past few weeks have been like nothing any of us could have ever imagined. When reports began to come out of China in January of a new virus that had apparently jumped species from animals to humans and was spreading rapidly through the population of Wuhan, few people in the West took more than a passing interest. For those of us of a certain age, this is the fourth potential pandemic to emerge from China in the past twenty years – SARS, Swine Flu and Avian Flu were all suppose to be about to bring the UK to its knees but the most serious impact that I can recall is having to place our small backyard poultry flock under lockdown for a few months when Avian Flu threatened. This meant that, although being no stranger to the pandemic planning process stood me in good stead when it came to formulating a response to Covid-19 in both my personal and professional lives, there was undoubtedly a part of me that did not take the threat entirely seriously. After all, we hadn’t we been here before: much ado about nothing for a while and then back to normal?

That misplaced optimism soon evaporated as, along with the rest of the country, I watched, transfixed with a mixture of horror and disbelief, as the virus spread across the globe, aided and abetted by the highly connected world in which we live today. This global connectivity and the ability of the virus to cross continents within a matter of hours, hitching a ride with its human hosts via long-haul air travel, is one of many reasons why the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 is potentially several orders of magnitude more deadly than the oft-quoted comparator of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, which claimed more lives than the industrial-scale slaughter of the Great War.

The first documented case of Covid-19 infection was recorded in the UK on 31st January and exactly four weeks later on 28th February the first case not involving a patient who had travelled to an infected area overseas was recorded. By 1st March, cases had been confirmed in all four constituent parts of the United Kingdom. The UK Government announced a four-pronged strategy to tackle the outbreak: contain, delay, research and mitigate, which was explained to the public by the man who became an unexpected public figure, and one who inspired more public confidence than the politicians as people turned to the experts for reassurance, Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Witty. Unfortunately, the ruling Conservative Party’s instinctive support for the liberty of the individual and congenital distrust of state intervention in people’s lives led to the Government’s clinging to the now-discredited strategy of allowing the virus to spread to encourage ‘herd immunity’ just at the time when the window when the “Contain” element of their response was briefly open and an early adoption of a policy of enforced social distancing might have been succesful in more or less stopping the incipient pandemic in its tracks. As it was, by the time the Government eventually announced the closure of schools on 18th March, it was effectively playing catch-up with what many institutions were already doing off their own bats. It was not until 20th March that all pubs, clubs, restaurants and indoor leisure facilities were ordered to close and tighter, legally enforceable measures to encourage social distancing were not introduced until 23rd March, a full week after the Government first began encouraging people to take these steps voluntarily. If, as Harold Wilson said, a week is a long time in politics, it is an eternity in a pandemic and we will probably never know how many lives have been lost as a result of that week when political ideology was yet again allowed to triumph over expert advice.

However, proving that principle in politics is an infinitely flexible concept, new Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a £12 billion package of measures in his Budget of 12th March to mitigate the damage caused to the economy by the Covid-19 outbreak. This was followed on 17th March by an announcement of loans and grants to support businesses, on 20th March by the potentially uncapped Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and on 26th March by support for the self-employed, taking the total value of support measures to nearly 3% of GDP. This is dwarfed by the £330 billion of loan guarantes underwritten by the government as part of its support to business. This represents the very type of Keynesian state intervention in the economy that the Conservatives and their allies in the right-wing press greeted with howls of derision when Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party proposed them in their 2019 General Election manifesto and which were subsequently roundly rejected by the electorate. Had a Labour Chancellor introduced these measures, and a Labour Government sought to curtail people’s liberty in the way that we are currently seeing in Lockdown Britain, the Conservative opposition and the press would have been shouting about socialism and whipping up public unrest and civil disobedience to thwart the Government’s “Soviet” intentions. As it is, a Conservative Chancellor and a Conservative Government have been able to introduce these measures to almost universal support from all sides of the House of Commons and the media. Politics in the UK has truly passed through the looking glass in recent weeks and it seems at times that we are living in a bizarre alternative reality where all the old certainties have been turned on their heads.