Pandemic-led Shift to WFH Ideology
As long as people have had regular, routine-bound jobs, they have had the desire for something away from the ordinary. The protest against the nine-to-five grind has been around since nine-to-five began, or perhaps a few weeks after that. Humans’ proclivity to want something different and find their own pace for accomplishing tasks has led to several positive outcomes, from groundbreaking discoveries to sustainable research in the sciences. Despite the indications that work can and does happen in any setting and within any timeframe, the nine-to-five mindset has endured.
Whether it is the traditional and very universal ‘early bird gets the worm’ adage (which is also responsible for morning schools being seen as decidedly better than evening schools across the globe) or the notion of getting all the work done while it is still light out, the established norm is that of working in an office in the daytime and coming home in the evening. This ritual’s rhythm combined with the often-forced celebratory sense in the weekend constitutes the understanding of the workday for almost everyone who collects a paycheck every week/month.
And then, 2020 happened and changed everything for everyone everywhere. Maybe not in the Bahamas as much.
Significant changes had to take place to keep the world running:
- Offices shut down, and employees took to personal computers to stay connected
- Meetings became virtualized, and apps such as Zoom, Meet and Teams became the new meeting room for companies big and small
- Jobs involving travel were put on a complete halt till the pandemic could be curtailed
- Schools, colleges, training institutes and learner-oriented organizations resorted to online teaching tools with haphazardly put together lesson plans and teacher who had not been trained nearly enough to manage and conduct digital classrooms
- Banking, fintech and economy-based fields took a hard hit and struggled to cope with increased digital demands and constant customer connectivity with no physical branches
Beyond opening a laptop and making sure your logged-in hours reflect your deliverables, there is so much more than employees have had to learn and change due to the restrictions imposed by worldwide lockdowns. People operating phones no longer have the quiet cubicles to conduct their sales pitches or troubleshoot software. They now have to deal with noisy children in the background, traffic outside the house, doorbells and ringing phones and of course, network issues. Meetings are predicated on who can be available when instead of when is the most profitable.
How does an entire populace cope with something entirely unknown? Pandemics might have been an integral part of human history, but they have been far enough apart that mostly, no one generation lives to see the same sort of crisis happen twice. This also means that the readiness quotient of any such event is relatively weak, and people rely on innovation and emergency response more than preparedness.
While remote working was already becoming a popular alternative to the typical office structure, the idea was still to contain them within the 9–5 framework, albeit in prettier-looking spaces. Enterprises such as WeWork based their strategy on the assumption that people didn’t want to work in their offices and would thrive in slightly more open plan, freer and colourful offices with fewer constricted cubicles. However, that was quickly disproved when work output didn’t increase at the same speed as did the cost for maintaining such offices. Starbucks, Costa Coffee and Barista, have long been associated with the hipster desk — younger professionals spend multiple hours a day at the café and set up their entire office on the coffee table, having meetings, client pitches and everything else that comes loosely under ‘work’.
Supremely successful businessman Ricardo Semler revolutionized the way workers’ get to work’ by telling them to choose the office they wanted to work from and the salary they wanted, and the work they wanted to do. Instead of taking undue advantage of the company, the employees came through with honesty and sincerity toward their work, and Semler has enjoyed that openness in his industrial foothold ever since. People tend to surprise when given the free reign to do what works best for them and the confidence in their decision-making abilities.
Work from home (WFH), work from anywhere (WFA), and remote work models are here to stay. They will also evolve into bigger, better things as people include more home office equipment, technology and lifestyles built around it. It would not be surprising if this decade gives the working world an entirely new industrial era, where the physical will give way to the digital and the virtual.
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