Remember when Monday mornings were like this? They're a bit different now. While those of us lucky to be working are now doing so from a spare bedroom or a kitchen table, the
Coronavirus has forced a sudden and mostly successful pivot to working away from the office. While the circumstances are unwelcome, there are some benefits
to this style of working. You have a more content workforce, a more motivated workforce, and also a more productive and
efficient workforce as well. So when the Coronavirus is behind us, will our workday ever be the same again? We spend a lot of our
time traveling to work and for most, the
commute is getting longer all over the world. Globally, two fifths of
professionals consider the commute to be the
worst part of their day. Commuting has been found
to be a major cause for stress that impacts on
our physiological health and as well, wellbeing. The total working day gets longer, you get less time at home, you do less exercises when
you have long commutes, you also cook less healthy food. I followed Swedish couples
over a 10-year period and we found that commuting
long distances to work over one hour increases
the risk of separation. Overall we find that it's
a 40% increase of risk of separating. Before the pandemic,
approximately 25 million U.S. workers spent more than 90 minutes getting to and from their jobs every day. In South Korea, one in four workers has a journey that long. One of those people is Park Jong Han, a manager at a major telecoms company. Basically, I throw away
three hours of my daytime just to get to work and
to come back home. Since February, SK Telecom has instructed its employees,
including Jong Han, to work from home, or if suitable, to work from smaller, local offices in the surrounding neighborhoods of Seoul. One of the mobile offices, if I walk, it takes about 15 minutes. I truly appreciate the time, and it actually comes back
to motivation to work harder. It's not just time, it's very
quality time that I spend instead of you know,
getting stuck in a bus, stuck in traffic somewhere,
you cannot compare. The amount of time that
I spent with my family really increased, you know? During lunchtime, I can
have lunchtime with my son. Have you just shortened your hours and you're able to go and, like you said, exercise more or do you find yourself working more as a result? Because it's been too long,
I totally forgot about it, but in the very beginning
when this program started, I was exhausted actually,
during the first few days because there's no place for rest, right? Because I need to work anywhere, wherever I go, my mind was always on work and when I talked to the teammates, they actually felt the
same, in the beginning. But after a few weeks, I think everyone found their own way to work and now I know how to adjust, you know, myself into, you know, work
mode versus rest mode and so on. So losing that journey into work could be good for us. But research claims our
commute can also provide us with a means to separate our personal and professional lives And in a world of 10-second bed-to-laptop commutes, that's a chance for some me time. But while journey times were
already generally on the up, more of us were actually
starting to commute less thanks to a relatively
new trend: Flexible working. Increasingly we have seen
people remote working from lots of different locations. There has been a reluctance
to encourage flexible working, perhaps because managers
see it as a loss of control, it can be quite difficult to manage people who you don't necessarily
see on a day to day basis, there might be concerns around efficiency or productivity. And is that a bit of a myth, or is any of that born out in fact? What we found is that productivity can actually improve as a
result of flexible working and there isn't necessarily any impact upon the business, if
it's managed effectively. There's quite a lot of benefits. There is an opportunity for workers to have more autonomy
over their scheduling, over when they work and where they work and when people have
that degree of autonomy, it does lead to a
workforce that is happier. You may have flexibility over the time that you have to go into work or the time that you can come home so
that you're able to avoid rush hour traffic and if
you're working from home a few days a week or completely at home, then obviously you can avoid
the commuting altogether and there's also benefits for employers. A study by Harvard and New York University found that for those working from home, the workday is 48 minutes longer, probably replacing that
time you spent commuting. There's significant
benefits for organizations that are able to manage these
kind of processes effectively. So what actions can
organizations implement to harness the power of flexible working? They need to have very clear
processes and procedures around operating flexible work so that everybody has
the same expectations. One department allows the
majority of their employees to work flexibly and another department which is led by another line manager who has a different
view, then you might find that flexible working
isn't as supported as much. You need to treat people consistently and in a fair way but you
also need to recognize that there can be individual differences in how people adapt to flexible working. It will suit some people but not others, so you do need to have
a degree of flexibility yourself as a manager
in how you manage teams and how you manage people. And this flexibility can
lead to productivity. A two-year Stanford
study of 1,000 employees at one company found that working from a home office resulted in a 13% increase in
productivity and 50% of them were
less likely to quit. Despite this, half of them
still wanted to go back to the office nine months later, even though their average
commute was 40 minutes each way. Another survey conducted
by Bain and Company on its own employees, found
that productivity increased for some thanks to no
commute and an ability to focus better at home, but
also decreased for others due to a lack of work mindset and a dedicated workspace. So perhaps we'll start
to see a more hybrid style become the norm, where for
some days we work from home for specific solo tasks and others we travel to the office to meet and collaborate with the team. The changing nature of our working lives has already led to many
white-collar workers leaving the city or moving further out, to find more space, some greenery, or to escape the urban beeps and bustle. One person who misses the
commute is Alice Shay, an urban planner and designer. I miss riding the subway. Riding the subway is one of
those incredible experiences in New York City, it's got its highs and it's got its lows, but honestly, the subway system in New York City is one of the greatest levers
for equity that we have. It is one price to get all
the way across the city. Many of us are now working
from home, you know, or at least for a couple
of days of the week. Will where we live drastically
change, do you think? We're in a moment where
commutes can be zero, so what does that mean
for how we are distributed across our settlements
and urban agglomerations? I think it provides a lot of flexibility for certain workers, it's true, but there's other ties
that keep people to place, right, it's not just about commute, so that's one factor amongst many. Access to services, access to family, access to the culture
that keeps the city alive or your lifestyle interesting. So the city as we know it
isn't exactly going anywhere, but it might change in
the way that we use it and the way it works? Our street infrastructure and streetscapes can be reconfigured in a
time of social distancing when we're understanding that private cars may not be as essential
as we thought they were. We posited that if you took
the streetscape in Manhattan, which is equivalent to four
times the size of Central Park, reconfigured it in a
way that actually looked at streetscapes as being
about space for mobility and distribution at a bigger scale, so how do we actually
decrease the number of cars and what are the opportunities
that come with that? So increased space for
pedestrians and walking, more effective distribution systems, buses could run at least twice as fast getting people around the
city in an equitable way. The transformation of the way
that we use our streetscapes could also enable better
delivery of urban systems. Is there an opportunity to
build more equality in cities, you know, key workers for instance who aren't doing jobs
on a laptop right now, they have to be in
those areas, don't they, you know, no matter what? I mean you bring up a great point. Service workers, essential workers, they are geographically bound. Mobile healthcare could be
distributed more widely, more equitably, particularly
if there's government and public drivers behind the
way that that is distributed. We're also seeing massive
changes in the way that retail is happening, right? Many, many shops are closed. When we have times when
cities are more porous, when there's flux, when you know, the real estate sector isn't so saturated, that porousness allows for an opportunity for microentrepreneurship
and also new innovations at a kind of small scale. You know, small businesses
that are starting up, food trucks that are
gonna be distributing food across the city, different
types of services that operate in different types of places. Our changing relationship with work could affect where we live, too. It could accelerate a move to what's known in urban planning theory
as the polycentric city. Polycentric city would be a place where you can work, you can live, you can recreate, you can
have your social life, your family in a more
local and distributed way. In cities like Paris, it's known as the 15-minute city, where daily necessities are
within a 15-minute reach on foot or by bike. You reduce transit times,
you reduce GHG emissions and also you provide more equitable, more sustainable access to services by this more distributed city model, but that's not to say that you need to live in the suburbs, right? So what's to say the office can't come closer to us? I think going forward, companies will need to support workers in that externality and it could take many forms. Does everyone wanna work from home? No, some people like going to a place, commuting, how are companies
that usually would say come to our main office, oh now actually we have a set of
sponsored co-working spaces across the city that are
closer to where you live and can decrease your
commute and maybe you go to those spaces three days a week and you come into the office two. I think we're gonna see a whole range of new types of work as
people have gained confidence in the efficiency of work
from home during this time. Since the virus outbreak, serviced office brand
Regus has already seen a surge of more than 40% in activity in New York City commuter
hub southern Connecticut. In the U.K., house builders
are seeing developments outside of London driven by a change in home office working. While experiences and jobs
vary all over the world, many workers have come to expect change. More than 90% of people in a recent survey said they wouldn't return to the office full time after COVID. There's reasons for employers
to embrace the change too. Some already are. Twitter and Facebook have said the switch could become permanent for
large parts of their workforce. The COVID-19 pandemic
has sent shock waves through the world of work. Having an on-off
relationship with the office could make us happier
and more productive, while also helping the environment and making our cities more livable.
For me its about having more choice where you get to live. I don't think people think this through enough. This could literally be the difference between having enough money to retire on or not. Sure if your on a VFX supe salary of course your not worried about this, but for the other 99% having access to a cheaper cost of living could be life changing.
Once this is over, it won't be long before VFX is claiming it's different and we all have to get back. Middle management want the control. Just look at Weta, they couldn't wait to stamp out WFH.
I totally understand a lot of people don't like WFH.
To be honest, some companies have embraced this as it solves their scaling issues that is very common in VFX.
At so many of these studios they go for "open office" concept which in my mind is just as distracting especially if you get chatty colleagues.
We also get kids shouting in the background for some of zoom meetings but we all just smile at it. I think most people understand that.
The public transport network in Vancouver is not the best and the 1 hour + commute is something I don't miss.
Personally I am glad that companies would not frown upon WFH or hybrid options atleast if that is something that employee would like. I am aware of two companies in Vancouver where they were allowing a WFH for some employees even before the pandemic.
The only people I've heard that don't like WFH are the ones that have loud pets and kids at home. .. mostly everyone else loves it.