Ever since the COVID-19 crisis engulfed us, one of the most recurrent sentence-openers to emerge from TV coverage, social media comments and our Zoom chats with friends and colleagues is, “When things get back to normal…”
But what if we are all, collectively, missing the point?
That longing mantra implies that what’s happening at the moment is a blip – a bug in life’s programming – and that the passing of said blip will herald a resumption of processes and patterns of behaviour that are identical in every way to what came before.
From that perspective, COVID-19, and the brisk restructuring of our lifestyles it has entailed, represent some sort of wild detour from the straight and narrow. And when we find our way back to the strip of pristine tarmac to which we were accustomed, we can get on with the blissful business of forgetting all about the pandemic as quickly as humanly possible.
Consider this, though: perhaps the ‘Age of the Virus’ is not some aberration that we should consign to the scrapheap as soon as it has blown over. Perhaps we should see it instead as a vital and instructive part of our evolution – one that will show us that some of the ways we did things before weren’t quite everything we cracked them up to be in the first place.
Case in point: the requirement for staff to be present and correct in a bricks-and-mortar workplace from nine to five every weekday.
Over the past month or so, a growing body of opinion from workplace thought leaders has suggested that the COVID-19 crisis marks a turning point for how we perceive – and indeed manage – professional life.
In particular, they point out, where flexible working was, until very recently, the subject of delicate bartering between workers and their leaders, the advent of lockdown meant that, suddenly, everyone was forced to collaborate in the full glare of each other’s webcams. Often while significantly rejigging their schedules to contend with the vicissitudes of childcare and picking the right moments to join those snail’s-pace social-distancing queues at local supermarkets.
In a 6 April blog, US public policy think tank the Brookings Institution pointed out that half of America’s employed adult population is now working from home – a watershed it describes as a “massive shift”, particularly in light of figures showing that, in the decade between 2005 and 2015, the US slice of regular home-workers grew by just 2% to 3%. In its disruptive way, COVID-19 has acted as a powerful accelerant to that trend.
Delving into the effects of that shift on the outlook of senior finance staff, the Brookings researchers quoted a recent, global Gartner poll of 317 CFOs, which found that a whopping 74% of them aim to move at least 5% of their previously on-site workers to permanent, remote positions on the other side of COVID-19. Almost a quarter plan to whisk at least 20% of their office staff to such roles.
Gartner Finance Practice vice president, research, Alexander Bant said: “Most CFOs recognise that technology and society have evolved to make remote work more viable for a wider variety of positions than ever before.
“Within the finance function itself, 90% of CFOs previously reported to us that they expect minimal disruptions to their accounting-close process, with almost all activities able to be executed off-site.”
Already it’s clear where the gravitational pull is coming from for finance professionals. And it’s not the ways of the recent past.
In addition to our sudden, mass awakening to the wonders of convenient tech, one compelling reason why our working habits are unlikely to snap back into pre-COVID-19 shape once we’ve contained the virus is our basic knack for adapting to survive.
Responding to the Brookings blog in a piece of her own, Kate Cooper – head of research, policy and standards at the Institute of Leadership & Management – said: “COVID-19 has forced people to learn how to work remotely with very little preparation time.
“The necessity to learn quickly and to engage with this way of working has meant that people have upskilled with amazing speed – and no doubt many professionals have found that they’ve been able to handle this adjustment really well.”
As a result, Cooper noted, those individuals “now… have a choice in a way that they didn’t have before, because they faced barriers such as not having the correct technology, not knowing the ropes of remote working and/or feeling that it is so much easier to come in and talk to colleagues face to face in the same premises.”
In other words, the COVID-19 fallback plan has forced everyone into a rapid, collective upgrade – and no one is going to be able to pretend it hasn’t happened.
Similarly, the writing is on the wall for some of the more trenchant views of bosses who have clung to the sacred nature of the centralised office for years and expected their staff to do the same – no ifs, ands or buts.
In a recent, emailed opinion piece, Claire Crompton – CEO of Bolton-based digital marketing agency The Audit Lab – argued: “Of course, when we do eventually come out of the other side of this virus, the world will be different in dozens of ways. But in terms of work, one huge impact will, I believe, be how flexible working requests are handled by employers.”
Crompton stressed: “Firms no longer have the excuses they once did when dealing with someone asking to change their work schedule, whether it’s an ad-hoc, work-from-home day or going down to part-time hours.
“What this virus has done to the working world is prove beyond a doubt that flexible working, working from home and working remotely can work. There’s no getting around it now.”
Inevitably, as beneficial as this evolutionary step will be in the long run, it won’t be a smooth ride. There will be teething troubles and downsides along the way, about which the Brookings blog is entirely honest.
“Productivity boosts aren’t guaranteed,” it notes, “especially if employee performance is difficult to monitor.”
On that very point, the blog cites the staggered rollout of a teleworking programme at the notoriously busy US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which gave a team of workplace researchers a “natural experiment” to chew on. Their study of the USPTO’s exercise picked up “a spike in procrastination among patent examiners who were assigned to telework, resulting in more rushed reviews that required greater revisions later on”.
A similar study of a teleworking shift among staff at a Chinese travel agency found that remote workers were less likely to be promoted than their office counterparts, despite being every bit as productive – because “managers have better perceptions of employees who are present”.
Then there’s that almost mystical issue of how workers’ imaginations heat each other up, and what sort of conditions best serve that process. In the early days of the lockdown, a column at privacy and security journal PrivSec Report pointed out that, during her tenure as CEO of Yahoo!, Marissa Meyer banned staff from teleworking, declaring: “To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side by side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices.”
The column’s author, Michael Baxter, asked: “Doesn’t a dynamic, agile business, always looking to innovate with more than half an eye on any potential threat posed by disruptive technology, need its staff working together? Doesn’t it need them feeding off each other’s ideas, creating a kind of melting pot of creativity?”
He pointed out: “Those who work with digital transformation talk about creating a working environment that breaks down barriers between departments – strategically placed water fountains, for example, kicking off discussions between people who might not normally converse, who benefit from the greater understanding this brings… If silos are the enemy of digital transformation, then isn’t a workforce scattered across as many homes as there are workers, the ultimate siloed workforce?”
However, as our behavioural tics and communication technologies evolve in line with our growing taste for telework, it seems only reasonable to expect that those lumps will be ironed out. After all, in early March, a study from tech multinational Lenovo – in partnership with the Centre for Economics and Business Research – showed that wider adoption of flexible working would boost the UK economy to the tune of £20bn.
And who’s going to turn that down?
Apart from a juicy economic lift, another bonus of telework and flexible working that employees will find hard to resist is the opportunity for people management to re-engage with the ‘people’ side of the equation and recognise basic, human needs.
Crompton is an enthusiastic proponent of using flexible working to offset elements of human behaviour that don’t necessarily line up with the tidy, straight edges of office life – indeed, her company made headlines late last year when it emerged that it gives staff ‘hangover days’ to bounce back from lengthy nights out, enabling staff to work from home in their PJs as they tend their boozy wounds.
In the post-COVID era, she wrote, “people are going to start putting their health, and the health of their families, even higher up their list of priorities. I predict, and certainly hope, that we will see a decline in unnecessary work after hours, the switching off of work emails, and generally doing more to combat stress levels.
She added: “Quality time with your loved ones, and being healthy both physically and mentally, will be most important going forward.”
Cooper has similar thoughts. “I’m particularly fascinated by the blurring of work-life boundaries that the current situation has necessitated,” she wrote. “Managers have had to engage with the totality of their workers’ lives. They have been Zooming into employees’ bedrooms, kitchens and lounges, with children, husbands and dogs roaming around.
“So even the most businesslike managers have been forced to engage at a much more holistic level with how their staff live their lives. I hope – dare I say, predict – that this will lead to a much more compassionate and understanding management style, simply because senior figures have had to get to know their people differently, and in a better way.”
Matt Packer is a freelance business, finance and leadership journalist