Mixed Experiences, Mixed Reaction

"We are home working alongside our kids, in unsuitable spaces, with no choice and no in-office days. This will create a productivity disaster for firms."               "Everyone assumes I would be gushing over the global rollout of working from home. Unfortunately not."                                                                              "Working from home with your children is a productivity disaster. My 4-year-old regularly bursts into the room hoping to find me in a playful mood shouting 'doodoo!' – her nickname for me – in the middle of conference calls."              "Many people I have been interviewing are now working in their bedrooms or shared common rooms, with noise from their partners, family or roommates."         "I fear this collapse in office face time will lead to a slump in innovation. The new ideas we are losing today could show up as fewer new products in 2021 and beyond, lowering long-run growth."                                                                     "They [study volunteers] reported feeling isolated, lonely and depressed at home. So, I fear an extended period of working from home will not only kill office productivity but is building a mental health crisis."                                             "Phone calls make collaboration harder. You don’t know if anyone is really paying attention. In one conference call I was on, I thought the background noise I was hearing was actually a vacuum cleaner. When I asked ‘is somebody vacuuming', the sound mysteriously stopped. While a video call could seem intrusive, it is essential for ensuring the attendees are paying as much attention as they would in a physical meeting."                                                                                                      Nicholas Bloom, senior fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) 

An Angus Reid Institute poll tended to conclude that circumstances involved in working from home lead to those questioned falling into the category of plus-or-minus satisfaction. Of people living alone, seven percent felt work productivity has been miserable, working from home. Those people working from home with spouse and children present saw 17 percent stating productivity has been minimized. Close to 30 percent of Canadians, as  result of the pandemic, work from home. 

For many people working from home -- which before the pandemic must have seemed to many the perfect way to balance work and home life -- now that it has become a reality, seems stifling, never ending, with continually incoming business emails and meetings intruding into what was meant to be personal time, once sacred against interference. A huge study of the globe's new, coronavirus-enforced work habits indicates that the average workday for those working from home is an hour longer than it once was, working at a normal work site.

Polls show Canadians are relatively pleased to work from home. Getty Images

There has been a realized increase of eight percent of emails into inboxes after business hours, leaving the average worker to deal with after-hours email on an increasing basis. On the other hand, even so, polls indicate that Canadian workers remain fairly pleased to be working from home, as discovered by a recent Angus Reid Institute poll which found 87 percent of workers in Canada described working from home as "really great" or "OK". Of those polled, a mere 13 percent felt the experience was dreadful.

By those in the know, it is assumed that the greater satisfaction is due in large part to less time spent in meetings than what was occasioned at a workplace, balancing out the longer working hours. Even as the average worker is now participating in about one additional meeting daily than previously and meetings tend to include on average two more people than before, the length of time these meetings consume has decreased.

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Meetings tend now to be around 12 minutes shorter in duration than they had been prior to the lockdown so that the average length of time spent in those meetings daily has been reduced by ten minutes. There appears to be no particular reason to account for the shorter duration of meetings, but researchers referred to a previous study finding workers struggle to stay engaged in virtual meetings compared to in-person meetings.

Data from digital communications software used globally was analyzed in a working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States. Because the aggregated data is anonymized the question of whether people are working longer days or just taking advantage of flexible hours while working from home went unanswered. "It is unclear if this increase in average workday span represents a benefit or a drawback to employee well-being."

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Researchers found that in the first week of the lockdown, a flurry of emails internally and externally were unleashed by workers. Emails continued to be sent in high numbers through the first four weeks of the lockdown, then tended to descend to pre-lockdown levels, though the number of recipients for each email has continued to be higher than normal, even when volume returned to normal levels.

The Post-COVID Workplace/City

"If pandemics become the new normal, then tens of millions of urban service jobs will disappear."
"The only chance to prevent this labour market Armageddon is to invest billions of dollars intelligently in anti-pandemic health care infrastructure so that this terrible outbreak can remain a one-time aberration."
Edward Glaeser, professor of economics, Harvard University

"Public transit agencies in many cities face extraordinary dual crises of both confidence and financial sustainability."
"[After the pandemic cities] will remain vibrant and dynamic centres of economic and cultural activity."
Jennifer Keesmaat, former chief planner, municipality of Toronto

"The Spanish Flu of 1918 killed as many as 50 million people worldwide, and yet New York, London, and Paris all boomed in its wake."
"In fact, history shows that people often moved to cities after pandemics because of the better job opportunities and the higher wages they offered after the sudden drop in population."
"Ambitious young people will continue to flock to cities in search of personal and professional opportunities. Artists and musicians may be drawn back by lower rents, thanks to the economic fallout from the virus."
"The crisis may provide a short window for our unaffordable hypergentrified cities to reset and re-energize their creative scenes."
Richard Florida, urban theorist, Toronto

World Bank/Peter Kapuscinski

"There's going to be a forced evolution at the office."
"I think we're going to see a change there, where you're going to have employees spaced out, they won't maybe be facing each other in the office."
"Keyboards, mice, headsets, those things are going to be personal accessories now. So you'll have either a locker at the office that  you can lock yourself or you're hauling it back and forth every day."
Evan Hardie, researcher, future of work

Companies will be challenged to redesign work spaces to allow for new COVID-infection-aware physical and social distancing rules. The SARS-CoV-2 virus threat will be seen as a harbinger for things to come; other threatening types of viruses will begin to come onto the scene once the current epidemic subsides, either naturally as the world learns to deal with it, or through an effective vaccine eliminating its threat. But COVID-19 will not be the last such threat, and the world and society will be adjusting to this new, permanent reality.

The open office trend that became familiar everywhere is now set for a complete reversal. Beginning with spaced desks, personal lockers, voice-automated technology, staged elevators and one-way hallways, with new protocols like varying shifts, cleaning surfaces after use and the wearing of personal protective equipment to the office, according to the expert forewarning of Evan Hardie, forecasting what the new workplace will resemble.

This, in a world that suddenly became quiet and shut down, where great cities' central squares and main streets reversed swiftly from busy thoroughfares, noisy and roiled with activity, giving way to still urban landscapes, absent vehicles of any description, as people huddled in their homes in social isolation, as ordered by frantic governments, anxious to ensure their suddenly-inadequate hospitals and health care systems weren't overwhelmed as critical care patients flooded ICUs and undertakers struggled to cope with corpses of those who succumbed to the virus.

Subway systems and elevators in corporate real estate were transformed into epidemiological hot-spots in the new global pandemic environment. City dwellers and downtown workers swiftly adjusted to the new reality of working from home, while small businesses, hotels, restaurants and bars, gyms and child-care services went on hold, and many were shuttered for good. No more tourists, business travellers, conference groups to keep hotels and restaurants flourishing, putting the service industry on notice that they'd be hard hit.

The sleeping city and the business accommodated in it traditionally will have to be nudged awake, however. Discussions emerged revolving around new types of social etiquette, including widespread masking. "Until recently, work happened in the office. We've always had some people remote, but they used the Internet as a bridge to the office. This will reverse now. The future of the office is to act as an on-ramp to the same digital workplace that you can access from your [working from home] setup", elaborated Tobias Lutke, Shopify CEO.

The Economist, in the United Kingdom, reported firms are now in the process of reconsidering "what offices are for, and many are concluding that a lot of tasks are better done from home", quoting a real estate firm, that "the days of people taking a 74-minute average commute into town to process email, and then 74 minutes back out -- they're gone". A different future now awaits workplaces and city landscapes.

Working from home is teaching us new skills - and can give us time to learn new ones, too

Image: DarkWorkX on Unsplash