Covid-19: is working from home really the new normal?

[Music] kovat 19 is transforming people's relationship to work with millions now out of a job and many more getting used to working in a very different way the proportion of Americans working from home full-time has gone from 1 in 50 to more than 1 in 3 Kovac has been the transformation and that raises a whole bunch of questions do you need as much expensive obvious space and do individual workers need to commute into the office every day the need for workers to gather together in offices has shaped almost every aspect of modern life and the shift towards remote working could have far-reaching consequences it could alter the shape and purpose of cities affect gender equality and even change how we think about time the modern office emerged along with the Industrial Revolution when people migrated to cities in search of work factories required everybody to be together so they could take advantage of the powered machinery that started to bring everybody into cities where they could work together and easily walk to the place where they were working that in turn led to the growth of the offices to manage all those companies early offices were organized into rows of desks for Clarks overseen by a central manager mirroring the production line on the factory floor and 200 years later despite the rise of the Internet the basic function of the office persists we made the leap from seeing that people could communicate via electronic means by email by shared documents without realizing that didn't mean that everybody had to be in the same place you've got mail we've had 20 odd years since the internet and office design is really only starting to reflect the real possibilities of that change the uncomfortable truth about offices is that they are expensive and inefficient company spend on average ten thousand dollars on office space per employee every year the most expensive office real estate is in Hong Kong where every square foot costs on average two hundred and sixty-five dollars per year Beijing and London are the next most expensive locations the need for social distancing in the wake of the pandemic could reduce the number of staff in London offices by two-thirds making the office look like an expensive artifact I've talked to companies that say they're thinking of maybe using two floors in the building instead of four or maybe using regional offices as small sub offices so that not everybody has to commute into a big city the idea of workers clocking in and out at the same time every day also dates back to the Industrial Revolution before that people were paid based on how much they made rather than the amount of time they spent at work and if the office ceases to be the center of working life the idea of working set hours or the nine-to-five will become less meaningful we may will work on a Sunday or Saturday afternoon if that's more convenient for us we're shifting back again to people being paid for their function and not for the time they turn up tech companies are leading the charge towards remote working twitter has already said its staff need never come back to the office if they don't want to and facebook says half its staff could be working remotely in a decade these types of high skill highly paid roles have a disproportionate impact on the economy they are known as knowledge jobs and where they are physically located is important as they support entire ecosystems of other jobs around them for every knowledge job by other jobs that are dependent on that some of these are very high skills like lawyers and doctors jobs like baristas Huber instructors and other sort of urban services once you add up a syllabus that they contribute the majority of Americans are employed in a way it means that they dependent on knowledge jobs although it's impossible to know exactly how many other roles are supported by these so-called knowledge jobs if they were to become remote positions it would have a profound impact on the jobs they support in the wider economy but this isn't a one-way street knowledge jobs are such powerful drivers of the economy because they are usually based in cities [Music] because they million people are more than 50 percent more productive than ones living in metros with smaller populations the question for knowledge workers is whether you can replicate those productivity benefits with a looser relationship to a city or to there's no relationship to a city those able to work from home are a privileged minority and in general the higher a country's GDP per head the more people are able to work remotely in Cambodia just eleven percent of jobs can be done from home compared with 45 percent in switzerland or 37 percent in America but the work from home revolution is having a particularly pronounced effect on some groups within the workforce women are more likely to work in face-to-face roles and so they have been disproportionately affected by the recession caused by covert nineteen in previous recessions men have generally been more likely to be laid off as they are over-represented in manufacturing and construction this time around more women in America have lost their jobs and those who've kept their jobs have extra challenges mothers are now interrupted over 50% more often than fathers but the normalization of home working during the pandemic could also have long-term benefits for some female workers each remote way of working that has no secret activates then I think that it might be a good thing so we're going to sort of help them break through although offices are sitting empty corporate leases can run for as long as a decade and there has not yet been a rush to sell office real estate so the office in some form looks set to survive the pandemic the global experiment in remote working has shown there are some things that are hard to foster online like corporate culture and creativity and these will be the mainstays of the post pandemic office that's about all I got to say Don good job of saying it or younger workers they make friends and connections and network where they can get on in life later on it's very hard to build a kind of a spree decor in a company for people who haven't met offices will be less of a prison cell and more of a collaborative area more of a games room where you go in to try and shoot the breeze with your colleagues and come up with something different it may feel like the pandemic has revolutionized working life but in some ways it has simply come full circle before the Industrial Revolution there was no working weep no nine-to-five or fixed workplace for many people and thanks to covert 19 this may be closer to the way things will look when the world emerges from lockdown I'm Vlatko behind Bartleby colonists of The Economist covering management and work if you'd like to read more about Kobe 19 and its effect on working life click the link opposite [Music]

Channel: The Economist

Views: 725,661

Keywords: The Economist, Economist, Economist Films, Economist Videos, Politics, News, short-documentary, covid-19, coronavirus, covid 19 outbreak, coronavirus update, coronavirus news, covid office, office, work from home, working from home

Id: MxDVucUZCnc

Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020