How "Future of work" might look like, post the coronavirus pandemic?

"The future is now". Work will be the way "it is now" since we have already pulled our future into the present, whether it is work, life or family. The debate is, what changes might stay on, after we are out of this pandemic? With much of humanity in some sort of lockdown it is safe to say some changes are here to stay.

Humankind always had the ability to learn, accept, change and survive. We are faced with a life-threatening pandemic and we have to manoeuvre our way through it. While I remain optimistic, that we will get out of this, we all should start accepting this as a part of our life and learn to live with it. In other words, we will have to pivot to a new normal.

Coronavirus pandemic has disrupted everything, claimed thousands of lives worldwide, put us under lockdown, played havoc with our mental health leading to depression and is threatening our livelihood in the form of a deep recession. While we are troubled by all those issues, one of the most important yet intangible disruption we are facing is the deviation from normalcy. If we undertake a deeper analysis, we would find ourselves wrong footed. While we, as a species are highly adaptable and have developed our capabilities to stay at the top of food chain with instincts like intelligence, compassion etc, on the other hand we humans also despise uncertainty and unpredictability. While it's OK to fail sometimes, It is best to reflect upon this incidence and learn from it, while getting back to some normalcy that might return once this public health emergency is controlled by the advent of some vaccine. It's going to change some things forever.

Coronavirus pandemic has forced us to work from home. While this has been a productivity loss for team-based projects, it has been a productive enhancing change for many others. Many organisations and third-party agencies are working on "data collection" out of this new arrangement. While we can make decisions without data, but in this case we should wait to be able to make a conclusion after looking at those study and surveys. It is safe to say this work from home concept has certainly been a change in terms of enhanced social distancing, cost rationalization, increased virtual team building and collaboration. This trend will continue in some job profiles that need minimal human to human physical interaction. Companies are looking forward to use this opportunity to move most of such staff into a 'working from home' arrangement. Let's look at this study from Gallup panel 2020. The percentage of working population willing to keep working from home is much higher if their employers let them decide.

While this may be a cost rationalization prospect for employers, the commercial real estate market might see some pressure due to low rates of occupancy and less commercial space been rented. Since, commercial real estate industry is built around the concept of people working together, in close proximity, in teams, it puts physical presence in the centre of the model. This concept might face disruption leading to some unique concepts coming up related to physical distancing. The office as a concept won't completely disappear, but will change to accommodate increasing need of people staying close yet physically isolated. The idea of open office floors won't find many takers while the concept of cubicles might make a comeback.

The increased use of video conferencing and collaboration technology during social distancing would continue in a post COVID-19 period as well. This is one of those areas where a shift has been happening from quite some time, since it is perceived to be the future of collaboration and with the availability of 5G technology it will touch new heights. China has recently announced it would be conducting the Canton fair completely online this year. The pandemic has just accelerated the process and forced many individuals 'who were earlier reluctant' to take this up to stop procrastination and get on with it. As we might have to live with this virus for some time before a vaccine can be made available to humanity, this trend will stay on and most of the companies will encourage their employees and customers to avoid physical meetings and make use of video conferencing to process work. This also brings with itself less transport, thus cost rationalization at many levels like logistics and time saving can be expected.

At one level this work culture will promote new ways of performance measurement. Human resources have to rely on completely new set of technology to measure something which isn't physically present in the office. This might lead to more surveillance software being installed into your work computers. Not that something like this doesn't happen now but there are chances of this trend getting accelerated. Whether something like this is an absolute necessity is debatable but employers argue that responsible monitoring is necessary to ensure productivity while people work from home. There might be push-back by employees in developed nations, counterparts in developing nations are less likely to be bothered by it.

As much of the workforce today is millennial population, the transition to technology and finding the new normal, should not be a major issue. Psychologically this generation is the least resistant to technology. This generation took the leap from analogue to digital in many ways, so they know what to expect out of the future. One of the reasons the gaming industry has been catapulted by the COVID-19 is the ease of collaboration while remotely working. This is good news but at the same time using technology to collaborate and work brings its own disadvantages. Since technology helps us to connect with anybody, anytime, people might be forced to get more productive and, in the process, might feel burnt out. This transition will give a big boost to the gig economy which has already been growing lately. More youngsters would like to embrace the 'future of work'. Interesting times are ahead for employees while they transition into the 'future of work'.

Conclusion:

Future of work would rely on collaboration while people stay physically apart. Remote working is going to be the new buzzword. While it will contribute into cost rationalization for many employees, the productivity might go down in the short term before people get used to working this way.  Remote working would not work in manufacturing and assembly related work where physical presence is necessary. There we would see a careful and planned social distancing and sensitization effort inbuilt into everyday process. Unless we have a vaccine, we will have no option but to live this new normal. While we scramble with this disruption it should always be our intention to imbibe and practice tools and techniques that we think useful and futuristic in a post-covid world as well.