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This Article is also published on Medium As I write this we are still in what I guess are the early stages of the Corona Virus /Covid-19 Pandemic. Whilst the situation is still rapidly changing, I am not alone in thinking that some of the social impact from this outbreak will be long-reaching. It’s mid-March and I am in the UK. Sports and social events are being cancelled left, right and centre as people are advised to stay home. I am a ‘knowledge worker’ and able to work from home. I didn’t always though - I had a previous career in healthcare where people were very much expected to attend for work in person, at the office and to ‘dress smartly’ even though nobody besides their immediate colleagues would see them- very old school. A great number of the people I worked with could have just as well worked from home but the organisation simply didn’t have the interest or the will to let them do so. Separately, I have a Master’s degree in Cultural History - as I describe it, the ‘Whys’ rather than the ‘Whats’ of history. Let’s put all this together try and take a longer view of what’s happening now, not just the ‘right now’:

Current Commentary Around Homeworking #

It’s been fairly widely publicised that tech firms are asking their staff to work from home during the current pandemic. Yes, in many respects it is easier for them to do so than other sectors. In many cases it is common for some staff there to be working remotely anyway, the work itself can often be done from anywhere, and such organisations are generally keen to embrace new technology. There are still challenges with the current situation, but they are generally operational or peripheral, not an issue of culture. In the wider world, though a lot of companies have until now been resistant to remote working, even where there has been no real need, and have created all sorts of exceptions for themselves, generally based around Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) to explain why they Can’t Do IT(TM). Some common ones I have come across:

• “X, Y, Z other workers need to be able to meet with remote_worker”
• “It wouldn’t be fair on those workers who do have to be here if we let some people work from home”
• “We have all sorts of requirements from Occupational Health and Safety to ensure adequate workstations for our staff, we can’t ensure that elsewhere but we could still be liable for work related injury”
• "(Some) part of the job is confidential and we can’t ensure confidentiality outside the office"
• “How can we ensure people don’t abuse the ‘privilege’ with late starts, early finishes, long breaks’?”

Frankly, these concerns are largely specious, but of course there may be concerns from the workers also. Whilst there are many jobs that do require attendance in person, e.g. working in a restaurant, even where this isn’t the case, remote working can take genuine effort, people may enjoy the social contact and clear boundary between work and home, and in some cases struggle to ensure a suitable workstation or work area at home. Generally though it seems telling that most of the current questions and recriminations are from the labour force rather than the employers:

“Things Covid has proven:

1. The job you were told couldn’t be done remotely can be done remotely

2. Many disabled workers could have been working from home, but corporations just didn’t want them to.

3. Internet is a utility, not a luxury

4. Universal healthcare is necessary”  

@MarcusGrayDoor

  It’s not just the workers of course. There’s also students:

“My school just went full online and I dropped out last month because I was told that I couldn’t go online part time for my disability or care assistant reasons. This is BULLSHIT.”

@jocyofthedragon

 

As Alex Hern, Technology editor for the Guardian, writes:

  “But it looks increasingly as if the situation will not ever go back to how it was: many employees for companies who have sent all staff home are already starting to question why they had to go in to the office in the first place.”

The Longer view #

Now, let’s step back slightly from today’s chatter and look at the longer view. It’s a truism to say that social change lags behind technological change but let’s look at some comparable examples from the past where circumstances forced rapid social change and what’s different today that could make this a watershed moment in distributed working:

Social Change #

Social Change is slow (usually), for example, it will be common for families to have lots of children if infant mortality is high in their country. 100 years ago it was common to have 6 children per family in the UK, 200 years ago, perhaps a dozen. Today 3 is considered ’large’ and more than that exceptional. In some parts of the world it still is common to have many children, but generally as infant mortality reduces, people tend to have fewer children. We can see this trend in countries around the world but it takes generations in each case.

The Black Death #

Mediaeval Europe was run according to the feudal system. The population was mostly rural. The Aristocracy and the Clergy reserved power and authority. The bulk of people were peasants or serfs bound to the land. They simply weren’t allowed to travel any distance or own anything of significance themselves. When the Black Death arrived in 1348 it wiped out 1/3 of the population of Europe in 2 years. Demand for, and the value of, labour shot up. People were able to up and move if they wanted, they were simply too valuable to be penalised because some other lord was losing out. Serfdom essentially ended in many areas.

World War II Home Front #

In World War II the United Kingdom engaged in ‘Total War’- Ordinary men were called up to fight and women were called into the factories and onto the farms to do the work previously done by men. Suddenly you didn’t need to have served 7 years as an apprentice to be a mechanic, those tanks and planes and ships could be manufactured almost entirely by women whose previous experience might have been limited to domestic crafts or comparable work until a very short time ago. There was no time for preciousness about it, the country had to get the most it could out of what was available, right now. As an example, one of the great British planes of the era (and there were many crap ones too!), the De Havilland Mosquito, was specifically designed to be largely built out of wood so that it could be produced in factories that previously produced furniture or musical instruments - motor vehicle factories were already busy producing more metallic aircraft. At the end of the War there was a UK general election which Churchill, the great war leader, lost. He wanted everything to back to the way it was with segregated privileges in society, but the social change had already happened, women could work outside the home, people could retrain, and society would not consider going back. Atlee came in and amongst other things the NHS was founded.

“Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come” #

Whilst this quote is attributed to Victor Hugo, if he had not come up with it then someone else surely would What we can see from current responses to Coronavirus is that if the alternative is complete shutdown, organisations are suddenly able to countenance change, however rapid, however painful, however awkward they may have previously felt about it. As I write, infections are not expected to peak until May, and presumably will take some time afterward to subside. It’s not all negative though, consider some of the positive enablers which were not previously available:

Video conferencing #

Today video messaging solutions are considered normal. You have to go out of your way to get a dumb phone and everyone and their grandparents can use Skype/WhatsApp videocalling or similar. Nobody pretends that you ‘can’t’ do it.

Remote Healthcare #

Hospitals have offered telephone clinics to some patients for a long time. Remote GP solutions such as GP at Hand are still new but they are here and they work. We can expect them to become a lot more common, just like Uber has changed the face of mini cabbing (private hire). The tools for people to access them are already here, the motivation has arrived.

There’s also some underlying trends:

Casual officing #

There has been a long term trend away from individual offices and towards open plan or cubicled offices. This has been largely economically motivated- companies want employees in the office but they don’t want to spend any more on the accommodation than they have to. From now on we can expect companies to question this. Casual Officing is already here, most famously perhaps with WeWork. At some point, established companies will wake up and wonder why they are paying stupid money for offices that people don’t want to go to when it is cheaper to equip staff to work from home and they have then already grappled with the mental leap for things like staff management. Just as in World War II U-Boats were built with only enough beds for just over 1/2 the crew, who were expected to share, so we can expect offices to reduce in size significantly below what would be needed to give everyone their own desk at the same time. Sure, people might be called in sometimes but not expected to do so every day. Company rents can drop and HR can sell it as another staff benefit.

Commuting, Environmental Impact and The Disabled #

The school run. Rush Hour. Both are miseries caused by an unhealthy attachment to a practice that has been until now taken as sacrosanct- “I have to get to work” ; “kids have to be in school”. Each produce a significant environmental impact, incur significant expense and have a whole range of secondary impacts. It’s not just the tweets above, when I worked in healthcare I worked with some staff who experienced some life changing events that required special accommodation for them to continue. Sure we could make accommodations at work, but we couldn’t do a great deal for the commute. In central London, public transport simply isn’t accessible, or safe for people suffering some conditions on some journeys. Senior management would not consider homeworking for reasons like those already listed, and as a result, experienced clerical staff, who could have otherwise continued to work, and were keen to do so were prevented and excluded from doing so simply because of the commute. Meantime the organisation would continue to pay for outsourced services staffed by homeworkers for tasks that were 80% of these workers’ jobs… With Coronavirus, the genie is out of the bottle for homeworking. It’s something that the unwilling orgainsations have been forced into by circumstance. They can no longer pretend it is not possible for staff whose work is via telephone and computer.

Checking the Brakes #

Yes, there are some jobs that do require attendance in person. We cannot pretend that all jobs can be done remotely. In many cases though, especially anything considered ‘Office Work’, it’s worth re-examining some ideas previously held unquestioned.

Four causes of error #

In the 13th Century, Roger Bacon described ‘4 Stumbling Blocks to Truth’:

• The example of unreliable and unsuited authorities
• The long duration of habit
• The opinion of the ignorant masses
• The propensity of humans for disguising ignorance by the display of psuedo-wisdom

It should be obvious how these are applicable to the current argument.

The Wrap-up #

We can expect homeworking to be normalised from now on, including in many areas that were previously resistant to it. The expectation is there for it  and the case is overwhelming, both from the positive and the negative motivators. The inertia has been arrested and everyone has seen behind the curtain.