Last year, just after the pandemic started and I found myself working from home full time, I had a conversation with an old acquaintance. He’d recently branched out alone and set up his own communications agency after many years working in public affairs. During our conversation we discussed barriers for small companies and whether the lack of an office would put him at a disadvantage in winning contracts compared to larger firms.
It was a question that took me by surprise. Afterall why should where a company is based have any bearing on whether they can do the job they are employed to do? Should it really matter in today’s world? It got me thinking about how 2020 has seen a seismic shift in how many of us work and I wondered if that change was here to stay.
According to YouGov, an international research data and analytics group, before the pandemic 68% of British employees never worked from home. In September 2020 48% of those questioned were either working from home on a full or part time basis.
A staggering 91% of those who never worked from home before COVID but now do so all the time, said they want to be able to carry on homeworking at least some of the time. Of those that had moved from never working from home to sometimes working from home, the number that said they’d like to carry on with some form of home working was nearly as high, at 81%.
There are many benefits to working from home, the most notably being a better work/life balance. There are also money saving benefits when you take away your daily commute and many people claim to work better at home as there are less distractions. And for those with a disability and who’d could struggle to travel to an office, homeworking can take away any barriers they might normally face in the job market.
Before the pandemic the thought of many companies offering work from home as standard was unthinkable. Flexible working was something that you had to request and wasn’t always granted. Are we now seeing a shift from what was the ‘normal’ into an acceptance that working from home is good for business and good for employees?
There is certainly evidence that many companies are moving to offering flexible working as standard. Just recently Unilever announced that their office workers will never return to five days a week behind an office desk. In the UK Aviva are one of the latest companies to announce they are reducing their offices and allowing employees to work from home if they wish. And the likelihood is that the longer we have to homework, the more normal it will become (in the UK we are currently in our third national lockdown and some, myself included, have been working from home now for nearly twelve months).
It’s not only us that benefit when more people work from home, the environment benefits too. In the UK during the first lockdown in March 2020 road traffic reduced by 70 per cent and flights ground to a near halt. China’s emissions were down 18 per cent and the US saw the biggest fall in emissions since World War II. Although not anywhere near enough to reverse decades of damage done to the environment — it is surely a bit of rest bite with some species benefitting from the absence of human interference. However, whether this will be sustained after the pandemic and people start to travel globally again is something we’ll need to wait and see.
We’ve all become used to holding meetings via Zoom or Teams, so much so in fact that I’ve started to wonder whether all those trips I took for business meetings/networking or courses before 2020 were actually necessary. And I’m not alone in this. Many people I’ve spoken to during the pandemic admitted that they’ve now come to realise that many of their business trips weren’t always necessary. We’ve proved that online meetings work, that they are just as effective, but without those unnecessary journeys. Of course, there will always be meetings that are better done in person, but I’m positive that we’ve learnt that many of them can in fact be done online.
However, it’s worth remembering that moving from an office culture to a work from home life it isn’t great for everyone. For some people the isolation can be extremely hard to deal with. Gone are the interactions we had with other colleagues, the gossips while making our morning coffee, the lunchtime chats about things other than work. It’s hard for some people and those employers who really care have noticed this and work hard to remind people to check in on their work colleagues and have support in place for any employees that are struggling.
Please check out this blog from Mental Health UK if you’re struggling with working from home.
It’s worth remembering as well that not everybody can work from home — it’s predominantly reserved for people who are normally office based. Those working in health, retail, transport and construction can’t work from home. The reality of this is that homeworking tends to benefit those that earn more than those working in areas such as retail or construction.
There’s also the impact on our High Streets to take into account. A recent report by KPMG paints a sad picture that a move away from the office could cost around 400,000 retail jobs in England as more people turn away from high street shopping and rely even more on internet shopping. Our traditional high streets have been struggling for a while now — though the pandemic seems to have brought along a quicker demise. It is time to look again at our high streets and how we will use them in the future?
Whatever happens to how we work in the future is not something I can predict, however, I’d like to think that we can take something positive from this pandemic. It would be nice to imagine a world where we are not tied to office life. A more flexible world where I get to spend more time with my family and do the things I enjoy. I’d like to think that homeworking will become the norm for those that want it and that we’ll think twice before taking that unnecessary journey. But I guess only time will tell whether we soon slip back into the old ways of working.
