B.C. / A.D. We all know the meaning of these acronyms, don’t we? Acronyms that define the two great epochs of human history. B.C. obviously means ‘Before Corona’ and A.D. means, say, ‘After De-confinement’.
This is the first in a series of articles that may be quite long. I will try in these articles to discuss the changes that the global pandemic has brought to our lives, in the economic activity, in the social environment. Of course, the main interest is related to advanced technologies and how they, together with basic and applied scientific research, can help shape the world after Corona. The A.D. world.
The first phenomenon that I will discuss is related to working from home. The imposed isolation has caused many work places, smaller or larger, corporations and private companies or government institutions to discover or prioritize the methods of work by which employees perform their tasks at home, remote from work, using Internet connectivity to connect with with the company resources, with other employees and colleagues, or with customers. Here I probably need to introduce a personal disclaimer. I retired about four years ago and the last 16 years of my active professional life I was the employee of a company for which the equipment and programs that allow working from home or between centers of activity distributed in the world was one of the main lines of research, design and production. My international standardization work has been and continues to be (less intensively) in the field of Internet communication. So I have direct knowledge and passionate ideas on these issues, although I lack material interests of any kind. One of the first observations in this area is related to the fact that the process of decentralization of economic and social activities was already underway. Corona only caused a fractal increase in interest and accelerated its development. We are witnessing the acceleration of a phenomenon that was already taking place. About four decades have passed since the invention of the Internet. Many of its effects are beginning to become visible. The same happened in the previous industrial revolution, which had two stages. The introduction of steam engines led to the creation of large plants that had only one central source of energy. Industrial electricity, patented and introduced around the 1880s led to the distribution of energy sources – multiple points of distribution of electricity replacing the central steam engine. However, about four decades passed between the introduction of electricity distribution and the spreading of factories with electric machines operated by individual workers or work teams. The same time gap can be recorded in many branches of activity of the modern economy. We had to get to the 2020s for distributed Internet access invented in the 1980s to become the infrastructure of the work model of the distributed economy.
By the end of the B.C. era, however, the paradigm of working at home was in a period of declining popularity. After gaining ground in the early years of the second decade of the 21st century with many corporations allowing employees to choose how they work and the days they want to travel to the physical headquarters of the company, in recent years we have witnessed a at least partial return of the ‘on-site’ presence. The champion of this trend to return to the old habits was Yahoo!, a company famous for the wrong but spectacular decisions made throughout its history. However, they were followed by other companies with famous names and solid reputations. IBM recalled in 2017 in its offices many thousands of the over 40% of its employees it had allowed to work from home. Companies like AT&T in the telecommunications field but also Bank of America in finance followed their examples. Some of the reasons were economic. Transportation prices, which were one of the economic incentives for telecommuting, had fallen, as had workspace rents. Companies like WeWork offered cost-effective solutions for managing workspaces. The pandemic that hit the world economy in early 2020 radically changed the trend again. Moreover, the few months of experience that have accumulated since then have demonstrated to some of the companies that have applied work from home more than necessary the viability of the model, at least from an economic and operational point of view. Many of them may never return to the way B.C. economy worked. Companies like Twitter and Fujitsu have announced that they will generalize their work from home for an indefinite period and will adapt their organizational structures. Google and Facebook have extended work from home until the end of 2020 and are examining similar plans. However, it is worth noting that this radical abandonment of most activities at headquarters is not generalized. It is not suitable for any type of activity or for any employee profile. There are wide internal (related to organizational structure) and external (service economy around jobs) economic implications. The psychological impact on family life is huge. Let’s examine some of these.
Until the first industrial revolution, most productive activity was ‘work from home’. Craftsmen worked in workshops at home or near their houses. Industrial workshops and later factories with their assembly lines introduced the model of physical premises, which will remain the dominant paradigm of the production of material goods in the A.D. period, although changes can and will occur here as well mainly due to the widespread introduction of 3D printers and of robotics. Office work in economics is a 19th century invention, introduced in the financial and media and communications sectors. The model that inspired large corporations and resulted in the office buildings and downtown business areas of the 20th century was that of political and judicial administrations. The peak of this trend was recorded I think in the middle of the last century. The model was first seriously challenged and the search for alternative solutions began with the energy crisis of 1973. In retrospect, we could consider that the advent of the Internet (in secret laboratories in the 1970s, as a commercial service in the next decade) was also the result of these searches. So working from home is not only a result, but maybe it was also an incentive for the advent of the Internet. The second technological element that facilitates the distribution of office structures to the home desks of millions of people is the paperless office. Practically, only in the last decade, software tools have become safe, versatile and ergonomic enough to be easily learned and used efficiently. The training required of an administrative clerk today is about as long and intense as that of an office worker 50 years ago. There is a good chance that some of the software tools will be known from home, from childhood (Internet applications, e-mail) as opposed to typing, for example, a requirement that was mandatory for secretaries half a century ago.
As soon as the option of working from home appeared, the skeptics also showed up. The questions they ask must be taken into account. How can the employer control the activity of the workers? What happens to teamwork and the social relations necessary for the success of long and complex projects? How can distractions, family events, or simply temptations at home be avoided? The answers exist, some are obvious, some less so. Measuring the activity of subordinates should be based primarily on results. In fact, this principle should have been implemented by any organization that aims for success, regardless of working styles. The number of hours spent at the desk is not an indicator of success, sometimes the opposite. Social relations can also be established through remote interaction, although here probably the most useful would be to use, when possible, a hybrid model, mixing virtual and physical encounters, occasioned by important milestones in project life, or created for the purpose to facilitate socialization. In terms of time use, the statistics highlighted a surprising fact. Distraction at work exceeds the one at home. Time spent on coffee, cigarettes and small gossip with colleagues plus the inherent mixture of the outside world via the Internet has a greater share and influence. Of course, here too, much depends on the personalities of the workers. Some will do the bare minimum. Others will let professional problems invade their lives and will connect to work outside of working hours, on weekends and holidays. Those in the first category must be identified and kept if needed, but they will do the same at home and in the office. The other will find that the way they work at home suits them and, in most cases, their productivity will increase.
It is obvious that balance must be sought. From the employer point of view, working from home risks invading private and family life. Already work psychologists, and other experts in the field work overtime on these issues (from home, of course, most of them). Companies that use or even generalize this method of working must also adapt their way of operating. The structure of the teams is no longer necessarily pyramidal, the optimal number of subordinates is no longer necessarily 7. (why 7? A mystery that we may discuss another time). Reorganizing, more egalitarian relations (more ‘flat’ as they are named recently), new criteria of evaluation are required. Floors of buildings, office walls and closed doors must either be virtually abolished or replaced with virtual equivalents. The good news is that communications technology and applications have also proven to be mature and reliable, and after half a year of Corona, it seems that the pandemic and the changes in work and life have found them ready. Some corporations and their workers have adapted their work styles and life styles. When the pandemic will be over, an analysis will follow and lessons will be learned. Some of the employees may return to headquarters. But not all, not in the same conditions. The A.D. world will be different from the B.C. world. We will follow, we will report, we will discuss.
(The Romanian version of the article initially appeared in the cultural magazine ‘Literatura de Azi’ – http://literaturadeazi.ro/)