Remote work has accelerated 10 years in 10 days. The only thing that could pull people back to the office is the ego of the bad middle manager scared of losing control – Chris Herd
The revolution in remote working , when it came, was peaceful. Orderly even.
There was no fightback from technophobe hold-outs barricading themselves into their offices. They simply packed up their laptop and went home with the rest of us.
The way things worked two weeks ago are not working today. All our previous beliefs and prejudices have been thrown out the window.
The managers who believe that you can’t trust people to work productively from home have had to adapt to a whole new world.
The people we were told were ‘change resistant’ have just demonstrated that they can change pretty damn fast actually.
Last week Bromford Lab hosted a debate about the new world of remote work and it was noticeable that – after the initial shock – people have adapted to different ways of working very easily. The coronavirus has moved the future forward in many respects.
The biggest challenge for people seems to be not the technology – but any combination of juggling work with childcare, staying motivated, finding a new routine and dealing with a changing workload.
A caveat: let’s not confuse enforced home working during an international lockdown with flexible working.
However the virus has just kickstarted the world’s largest workplace experiment in history. And right now there are going to be lots of CEOs and Boards looking at their empty offices which cost millions each year and thinking what the future looks like.
The World We Left Behind
Before we get all nostalgic about worklife before the lockdown let’s remember the world we had created.
- UK workers spend a year of their lives in meetings. If you work in the public sector it’s even worse – with nearly 2 years waste clocked up for every worker.
- We spent 492 days of our lives travelling to work, spending over £800 every year. . This has a huge impact on the environment and our mental wellbeing.
- The office didn’t have great long term prospects anyway. Only 14% of UK workers want to work in a traditional office environment in the future.
- It’s expensive. The average annual property cost for a British office worker is £4,800 ($6,000), according to Investment Property Databank.
Even if we only manage to cut meetings down by 50%, it’s conceivable that we could add 18 months of value back into the average workers life.
18 more months we could spend not working, but rather being with your kids or spending time with friends or your community.
Before life returns to ‘normal’ let’s consider carefully what we want to return to.
The World We Move Towards
Now is the time for some reflection about what we value and what we stand for. The actions of the large companies who first thought is to ‘furlough the non-essentials’ will be remembered for decades to come. Similarly those companies who don’t support employees who are striking a very difficult balancing act between family care and work.
People only truly believe that a company has a purpose and clear values when they see them sacrificing short-term profitability for the sake of adhering to those values.
We will remember what companies do next.
As Nick Martin writes in a piece for The New Republic:
The work of care, of real meaning, is what we should be concerning ourselves with now. It is not optimized, or “disrupting,” or any of that. It is just essential. Reaching out to offer support to the soon-to-be overworked nurses in our communities, contributing to local funds and efforts to feed and adequately compensate grocery workers, restaurant workers, and others who are working at great risk and may be struggling to put food on the table. We should be offering to make shopping runs for our elders and other at-risk neighbors. This is the essential work that demands our attention now, too.
In the Bromford Lab debate there was a lot of talk of what life should be like when we return to ‘normal’. One of my favourite quotes came from my colleague Steve Nestor:
Who says ‘normal’ was the right way to do things? We have an ideal opportunity to reset, rethink and rewire ourselves to create a more productive, more connected, happier and healthier new ‘normal.
For all the pain people are living though right now there is huge opportunity here. We may never go back to living and working in exactly the same ways we did before. In fact it would be a collective failure if we were to do so.
We’ll now need a genuinely radical review of the purpose of offices and that means having to think very differently about what it means to “go to work”.
It means getting to know teams, and actually listening to people as individuals with unique and frequently messy lives – rather than as efficient worker drones.
Letting our people become the designers of their own unique workday, and giving them the tools and permissions to create a happier and more fulfilling life for everyone could be the start of something special.
Paul Taylor 
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