Work Comes Home
"We are likely in the midst of a generation-defining event that will influence how consumers behave for years to come."
McKinsey, How Marketing Leaders Can Both Manage the Coronavirus Crisis and Plan for the Future, April 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has indeed been a "generation-defining event" that will influence how all of us behave, from consumers to producers, for years to come. Even as we return to “business-as-usual”, with the reopening of places that have been shut for three months or more, we will not be returning to the places as we remember them, they will be radically changed. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella aptly describes the scene: "As COVID-19 impacts every aspect of our work and life, we have seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months".
Working from home is not surprisingly the hottest topic around the “new normal” of coronavirus. But we need to remember that work from home is not a one size fits all. David Michaels of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University reminds us not to forget the 50% of UK workers, and 72% of Americans do not have jobs with the ability to work from home at anytime. He explains: “What is important about this pandemic is that it has shined a spotlight on workers who have been essential but before this were invisible.”
Where work from home has been an option, multiple organizations have conducted studies finding several positive outcomes from virtual work: radical reduction of carbon emissions, cost savings - from company costs to employee commute time & costs, more productivity from employees, improvement of work/life balance, a more equitable workplace for women and people with disabilities or chronic illness, and better mental health and a more diverse workforce.
Globally, the International Labor Organization estimates that: "18 per cent of workers have occupations that are suitable for WFH and live in countries with the infrastructure to enable WFH." Vox tells us that only 4% of the US workforce, for example, normally works from home at least part time (it’s just slightly higher for the UK), but due to coronavirus 34% of folks were working from home in early April. Whether this sticks, only time can tell, although Ben Pring, Co-Founder and Leader of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work was confident enough to make this prediction in early June: "probably 15% more will be working at home permanently than pre-COVID-19". Entrepreneur and adviser Hiten Shah reminds us that a transition to everyone who can moving towards permanent work from home would certainly be a radical shift from the status quo: “Right now, remote work isn’t working for most companies…That’s because we spent the last 120 years learning how people can be productive in an office.”
A Gartner survey says that “74% of CFOs and Finance leaders will move at least 5% of their previously on-site workforce to permanently remote positions post-COVID 19”. Nationwide was one of the first US companies to announce a transition to primarily working from home. Automaker Ford has extended work from home for most salaried employees "until at least the beginning of September". Amazon and Microsoft have announced that their corporate employees do not have to return to offices until October; Zillow, Facebook and Google have announced work from home until the end of 2020, and Shopify's offices will be closed until 2021.
Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge "I think we could get to about half of the company working remotely permanently" (in 5-10 years) and VMWare foresees 60% of their employees working from home "over time". Twitter, Square and Groupe PSA have made remote work permanent for those that are able to do their jobs from home. As of this writing, Mondeley, Barclays and Morgan Stanley were all looking at rethinking their working from home policies. Even state government, such as Silicon Valley's San Jose, California Santa Clara County board of supervisors, is getting involved with promoting virtual work, asking businesses to consider remote work as over 100,000 employees in their region commute for 3 or more hours per day, and they’ve seen as much as a 75% reduction in pollutant levels during the epidemic.
During this pandemic, Human Resources have become more crucial to businesses than ever before, as HR departments have been called upon to retain a sense of normalcy and connection. Michelle Davies, Vice-President of People at Phrasee explains: “Everyone’s been in panic mode, whether it’s fears over losing their job or that they weren’t able to buy toilet paper. But it’s not just about communicating with people formally about business matters. In the office, people have lots of informal connection points, so we’ve tried to recreate that virtually as you have to try and keep things as normal as you can.” In many cases work has become a lifeline to people who are isolated from their friends and families. Fun virtual activities such as pub quizzes, online fitness classes and after-work gatherings provide team-building and help alleviate the multiple stresses that the current pandemic has brought to people’s lives.
At Informa Connect, like over 92% of our customers surveyed, we've been working remotely due to COVID-19; and we've been producing most of our in-person events digitally. This has been an incredibly busy and exciting time; it's been a journey of learning what our audiences value most from our events and digital content. It's been important to us to keep the quality of our digital events as high as our award-winning live events; we've been focussed on making them not only seamless, but best-in-class, from top-notch content to providing as-good-as-in-person networking experiences. Once we are able to do in-person events again, we'll be bringing the valuable lessons we've learned to all our events and content - both in-person and digital. From Informa Connect's EBD Group transforming what would have been a Paris conference to a digital solution for their BIO-Europe® Spring event, to our cutting edge Finovate events going digital for summer and fall 2020, we've learned that it's important for attendees to both engage directly with speakers and network with their peers. We've developed apps, live polls and other key ways digital conference goers can engage with speakers and other attendees live and on-demand.
One company that's notably bucking the trend is Walmart. Their new 350 acre home office, expected to open in stages by 2025, is still on track; Fortune explains that their CEO Doug McMillon "firmly believes the value of in-person collaboration with colleagues will endure and says it won’t change the future home office’s design much".