Hampton’s Take - Remote Working is a Good Thing
The COVID-19 pandemic has revolutionised every aspect of our lives. From the most menial tasks of grocery shopping and socializing with friends to the big-picture items of the stock market and international flows of capital, daily routines, as well as carefully calculated patterns, have faced unprecedented disruption. Looking to the future raises one central question: what disruption will COVID leave in its wake?
In the long term, I believe that many industries will see dramatic shifts in operations which will change the nature of work itself. This argument rests on three basic assumptions: the relative success of the virtual workplace during the coronavirus pandemic, the costs associated with the traditional workplace, and the changing character of the worker in this day and age.
Workers’ successful adaptation to radically new circumstances in the months of the coronavirus pandemic has been reflected by high levels of success. Some of the most notable examples of this success include tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Google, but other success stories can be found in the marketing and entertainment sectors. The Guardian explores the success of WPP in the marketing sector, which has effectively managed over 100,000 employees working from home, but also companies such as Jellyfish Pictures, which has only 250 employees managing large projects such as portions of Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Black Mirror. Both companies report success on the sudden transition to working from home, despite wide variations in their number of employees and even the nature of their work.
This situation is win-win for the employer, who sees continued productivity with remote working alongside a reduction in overhead costs involved. Paying for office space and even the costs associated with relocating new hires, among other expenditures, can end — employers have ‘the ability to tap into talent anywhere’. The essence of the argument for work from home — termed by others as ‘work from anywhere’ — is the win-win-win generated by continued or even increased worker productivity during remote work, the benefits posed to the employer, and the benefits that workers themselves can enjoy with the flexibility of remote working.
Obviously, many did not find the initial combination of quarantine and work to be ideal, but with the easing of restrictions and the slow return to normalcy, the period of working from home reveals new flexibility which allows workers to choose different environments according to their tasks. The workplace, in short, no longer has to be an office from Monday to Friday, 8 hours a day, nor does it have to include extensive travel. The recent revolution in communication — smartphones, email, and Zoom — means that we can do more than we previously thought remotely.
Dylan’s Take - Remote Working Might Be Bad For Us
Many experts in the past few years have predicted that remote working and working from home will become more common as telecommunications technology renders clocking in at a physical workspace obsolete. Now, with much of the world’s population quarantined due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this trend has accelerated. If you are reading this, be you a student or member of the workforce, you’re most likely working or studying from home. What’s more, as companies figure out that their physical offices have been an unnecessary luxury for some time now, working from home will probably become as common as commuting to a physical workspace, if not more so.
For many, this will be a cause of celebration. And to be sure, there are definite benefits. For one, you can set your own hours, freeing you from the arbitrary confines of a typical nine-to-five workday, which so often chains people to their desks just when they’re at their least productive. This also means that some people will be more focused: gone will be myriad unnecessary distractions. No more chatty coworkers, oppressive bosses peeping over your shoulder, no more fussing over the right outfit to wear, and no more checking the time every five minutes, itching to get home.
But to celebrate the working-from-home trend would be a mistake. No, you won’t be forced to commute to a drab and uncomfortable office and stay there for an arbitrary nine-to-five shift. But, on the other hand: you’ll live at work, and unless you set your own hours and stick to them (which is harder to do than you might think) you’ll also always be working. Doctors are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of something called ‘sleep hygiene’. The theory, now well-founded, is that your bed should be reserved solely for sleeping, and not for studying, browsing social media, or streaming television. Doing any of these things makes it more difficult to sleep well. In just the same way, degrading the boundaries between the spaces in which you work, sleep, relax, and play hampers your ability to do all of those things. We are happier, healthier people when our bedrooms are for sleeping, our libraries are for studying, and our offices are for working. For many, working from home during this pandemic is posing a serious challenge to their mental health, a concern highlighted by the American Psychiatric Association.
Last but not least are the wider implications of remote working for society and politics, many of which are less than ideal. We’re living in an age when it’s become increasingly easy for massive, powerful corporations to subvert laws and exploit people through the use of technology and in an increasingly globalised world. When the corporate world realises that it can hire remote workers from anywhere in the world at a scale previously not considered possible or desirable, unions and workers’ rights might be hit hard. There’s even evidence that some companies are taking the opportunity to spy on their own employees. Our political systems and institutions will once again have to play catch-up to mitigate the worst impacts of disruptive technological and societal trends.
Remote working could be something good. But there is much to work out both on the individual and the societal level before we can give it more than a cautious welcome.