Covid-19 has forced a radical shift in working habits
Sep 12th 2020
Self-styled visionaries and people particularly fond of their pyjamas have for decades been arguing that a lot of work done in large shared offices could better be done at home. With covid-19 their ideas were put to the test in a huge if not randomised trial. The preliminary results are now in: yes, a lot of work can be done at home; and what is more, many people seem to prefer doing it there.
This does not, in itself, mean the end of the non-home office. It does mean that there is a live debate to be had. Some companies appear relaxed about a domestic shift. On August 28th Pinterest, a social-media firm, paid $90m to end a new lease obligation on office space near its headquarters in San Francisco to create a “more distributed workforce”. Others seem to be against it. Also that month, Facebook signed a new lease on a big office in Manhattan. Bloomberg is reportedly offering a stipend of up to £55 ($75) a day to get its workers back to its building in London. Governments, on which some of the burden will fall if the pandemic persists, are taking a similar tack, encouraging people “back to work”—by which they mean “back to the office”.
They face a difficult task. For working from home seems to have suited many white-collar employees. As lockdowns have eased, people have gone out into the world once more: retail spending has jumped across the rich world while restaurant reservations have sharply risen. Yet many continue to shun the office, even as schools reopen and thus make it a more feasible option for working parents. The latest data suggest that only 50% of people in five big European countries spend every work-day in the office (see chart 1). A quarter remain at home full-time.
This may be due to the residual fear of covid-19 and the inconvenience of reduced-capacity offices. Until social-distancing guidance ends, offices cannot work at full steam. The average office can work with 25-60% of its staff while maintaining a two-metre (six-foot) distance between workers. Offices which span more than five floors rely on lifts; the queues for access, when only two people are allowed inside one, can stretch around the block.
Some offices are trying to make themselves safer places to work. The managers of a new skyscraper in London, 22 Bishopsgate, have switched off its recirculated air-conditioning. Others have installed hand-sanitising stations and put up plastic barriers. But even if offices are safer, it can still be hard to get there. Many employees do not want to or are discouraged from using public transport—and one-quarter of commuters in New York City live more than 15 miles (24km) from the office, too far to walk or cycle.
However it also appears to be the case that working from home can make people happier. A paper published in 2017 in the American Economic Review found that workers were willing to accept an 8% pay cut to work from home, suggesting it gives them non-monetary benefits. Average meeting lengths appear to decline (see chart 2). And people commute less, or not at all. That is great for wellbeing. A study from 2004 by Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University and colleagues found that commuting was among the least enjoyable activities that people regularly did. Britain’s Office for National Statistics has found that “commuters have lower life satisfaction...lower levels of happiness and higher anxiety on average than non-commuters”
The working-from-home happiness boost could, in turn, make workers more productive. In most countries the average worker reports that, under lockdown, she got more done than she would have in the office. In the current circumstances, however, it is hard to be sure whether home-working or office-working is more efficient. Many people, particularly women, have had to work while caring for children who would normally be in school. That might make it seem as though working from home was less productive than it could theoretically be (ie, when the kids were in school).
But there are lockdown-specific effects which create the opposite bias, making work-from-home seem artificially productive. During lockdown workers may have upped their game for fear of being let go by their company—evidence from America suggests that more than half of workers are worried about losing their job due to the outbreak. A separate problem is that most studies under lockdown have relied on workers to self-report their productivity, and the data generated in this way tend not to be very reliable.
Research published before the pandemic provides a clearer picture. A study in 2015 by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and his colleagues looked at Chinese call-centre workers. They found that those who worked from home were more productive (they processed more calls). One-third of the increase was due to having a quieter environment. The rest was due to people working more hours. Sick days for employees plummeted. Another study, looking at workers at America’s Patent and Trademark Office, found similar results. A study in 2007 from America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics found that home-workers are paid a tad more than equivalent office workers, suggesting higher productivity.
The experience of lockdown has simply accelerated pre-existing trends, thinks Harry Badham, the developer of 22 Bishopsgate. That may be an understatement. Although the share of people regularly working from home was rising before the pandemic, absolute numbers remained small (see chart 3). According to one view, the fact that office-working was so dominant until recently reveals that it must be more efficient than home-based work both for firms and for workers. By this logic the success of a country’s emergence from lockdown can be measured by how many people are back at their desks.
But there is another interpretation. This says that home-working is actually more efficient than office-work, and that the glory days of the office are gone. The office, after all, came into being when the world of work involved processing lots of paper. The fact that it remained so dominant for so long may instead reflect a market failure. Before covid-19 the world may have been stuck in a “bad equilibrium” in which home-work was less prevalent than it should have been. The pandemic represents an enormous shock which is putting the world into a new, better equilibrium.
Brent Neiman of the University of Chicago suggests three factors which prevented the growth of home-working before now. The first relates to information. Bosses simply did not know whether clustering in an office was essential or not. The past six months have let them find out. The second relates to co-ordination: it may have been difficult for a single firm unilaterally to move to home-working, perhaps because its suppliers or clients would have found it strange. The pandemic, however, forced all firms who could do so to shift to home-working all at once. Amid this mass migration, people were less likely to look askance at companies which did so.
The third factor is to do with investment. The large fixed costs associated with moving from office- to home-based work may have dissuaded firms from trying it out. Evidence from surveys suggests that firms have in recent months spent big on equipment such as laptops to enable staff to work from home; this is one reason why global trade has held up better than expected since the pandemic began (see article). Such investments are made at the household level too. In many rich countries the market for single-family houses is stronger than for apartments. This suggests that people are looking for extra space, possibly for a dedicated home office.
Pour yourself a cup of ambition
The extent to which home-working remains popular long after the pandemic has passed will depend on a bargain between companies and workers. But it will also depend on whether companies embrace or reject the controversial theory that working from an office might actually impede productivity. Since the 1970s researchers who have studied physical proximity (ie, the distance employees need to travel to engage in a face-to-face interaction) have disagreed on the question of whether it facilitates or inhibits collaboration. The argument largely centres on the extent to which the bringing-together of people under one roof promotes behaviour conducive to new ideas, or whether doing so promotes idle chatter.
Such uncertainty is exemplified by a study in 2017 by Matthew Claudel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit) and his colleagues. Their study looked at papers and patents produced by mit researchers and the geographical distribution of those researchers. In doing so, they found a positive relationship between proximity and collaboration. But when they looked at the buildings of mit, they found little statistical evidence for the hypothesis that “centrally positioned, densely populated and multi-disciplinary spaces would be active hotspots of collaboration”. In other words, proximity can help people come up with new ideas, but they do not necessarily need to be in an office to do so.
However, not everything about working from home is pleasurable. In July a study from economists at Harvard, Stanford and New York University found that the average workday under lockdown was nearly 50 minutes longer than it was before, and that people became more likely to send emails after work hours. There is also wide variation between workers in how much they enjoy working from home. Leesman, a workforce consultancy, has surveyed the experience of more than 100,000 white-collar workers across the rich world during the pandemic. It finds that satisfaction with working from home varies according to whether that person has dedicated office and desk space or not.
The tide’s turned and rolling your way
And not everyone has the ability to work from home, even if they want to. Research published in April by Mr Neiman and Jonathan Dingel, both of the University of Chicago, found that across rich countries about 40% of the workforce were in occupations that could plausibly be completed from their kitchen tables. Evidence of actual working arrangements during the pandemic backs up those speculations. A paper from Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University and colleagues, looking at American data, suggests that of those employed before the pandemic began, about half were working from home in May.
Indeed, it is uncertain whether the benefits of working from home can last for a sustained period of time. Mr Bloom’s co-written study on Chinese call-centre workers is one of the few to assess the impact of working from home over many months. He and his colleagues found that, eventually, many people were desperate to get back to the office, if only every now and then, in part because they were lonely. Some companies which have tried large-scale remote working in the past have ultimately abandoned it, including Yahoo, a technology firm, in 2013. “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings,” a leaked internal memo read that year.
The challenge for bosses, then, is to find ways of preserving and boosting employee happiness and innovation, even as home-working becomes more common. One solution is to get everyone into the office a few days a month. An approach whereby workers dedicate a chunk of time to developing new ideas with colleagues may actually be more productive than before.
A study from Christoph Riedl of Northeastern University and Anita Williams Woolley of Carnegie Mellon University, published in 2017, suggested that “bursty” communication, where people exchange ideas rapidly for a short period of time, led to better performance than constant, but less focused, communication. Not much evidence exists that serendipity is useful for innovation, even though it is accepted by many as a self-evident truth. “A lot of people made a lot of money selling this watercooler idea,” says Mr Claudel of mit, referring to the growth in recent decades of open-plan offices, co-working spaces and trendy “innovation districts”.
Coming into the office now and then is not the only way of generating bursty communication. The same can be achieved, say, with corporate retreats and get-togethers. Gitlab, a software company, has been “all-remote” since it was founded in 2014. With no offices, it gathers together its 1,300 “team members”, who live in 65 different countries, at least once a year for get-togethers and team bonding.
Similarly, companies such as Teemly, Sococo and Pragli offer “virtual offices”, making it easier to communicate with colleagues, rather than going through the rigmarole of scheduling a video call. Using video messaging from Loom, a worker can record her screen, voice and face and instantly share it with colleagues—more useful than a conventional video call, as the video can be sped up or rewound. Gitlab’s workers follow a “nonlinear” workday—interrupting work with bouts of leisure. Rather than talk to their colleagues over live video calls they engage in “asynchronous communication”, which is another way of saying they send their co-workers pre-recorded video messages.
More frequent working from home will also demand the use of new hardware, and the withering away of other sorts. At present, many companies host large data-centres, but these have proved less efficient as more people work from home. Goldman Sachs reckons that investment in traditional data infrastructure will fall by 3% a year in 2019-25. In its place, companies are likely to spend more on technology which allows workers to replicate the experience of being in the same physical space as someone else (higher-quality cameras and microphones, for instance). The more utopian technology analysts reckon that within five years, people will be able to put on a vr headset and immerse themselves in a virtual office—bad strip-lighting, and all.
There’s a better life
All this has wide-ranging implications for public policy. At present it is impossible to know whether home-workers will find it easier or harder to bargain with their employer for pay rises and improvements in conditions, though the idea of asking for a raise through a video chat is hardly an appealing one. Employers may also find it easier to fire remote workers than if they had to do it face-to-face. If so, then calls may grow for governments to give home-workers greater protections.
Another problem relates to employment law, argues Jeremias Adams-Prassl of Oxford University. Just as the rise of the gig economy has prompted questions and court cases about what it means to be an employee or self-employed, the increased popularity of home-working puts pressure on laws which were constructed around the assumption that people would be toiling away in an office. No one has yet thought through how firms should go about monitoring contractual working time in a world where nobody physically clocks in, nor about the extent to which firms may surveil workers at home.
Battles over employers’ responsibilities to their home-workers surely cannot be far away. Should a business pay for a worker’s internet connection or their heating in the dead of winter? Grappling with such questions will not be easy. But governments and firms must seize the moment. The pandemic, for all its ill effects, offers a rare opportunity to rewire the world of work. ■
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "What a way to make a living"
The future of the office Covid-19 has forced a radical shift in working habits
Self-styled visionaries and people particularly fond of their pyjamas have for decades been arguing that a lot of work done in large shared offices could better be done at home. With covid-19 their ideas were put to the test in a huge if not randomised trial. The preliminary results are now in: yes, a lot of work can be done at home; and what is more, many people seem to prefer doing it there.
This does not, in itself, mean the end of the non-home office. It does mean that there is a live debate to be had. Some companies appear relaxed about a domestic shift. On August 28th Pinterest, a social-media firm, paid $90m to end a new lease obligation on office space near its headquarters in San Francisco to create a “more distributed workforce”. Others seem to be against it. Also that month, Facebook signed a new lease on a big office in Manhattan. Bloomberg is reportedly offering a stipend of up to £55 ($75) a day to get its workers back to its building in London. Governments, on which some of the burden will fall if the pandemic persists, are taking a similar tack, encouraging people “back to work”—by which they mean “back to the office”.
They face a difficult task. For working from home seems to have suited many white-collar employees. As lockdowns have eased, people have gone out into the world once more: retail spending has jumped across the rich world while restaurant reservations have sharply risen. Yet many continue to shun the office, even as schools reopen and thus make it a more feasible option for working parents. The latest data suggest that only 50% of people in five big European countries spend every work-day in the office (see chart 1). A quarter remain at home full-time.
This may be due to the residual fear of covid-19 and the inconvenience of reduced-capacity offices. Until social-distancing guidance ends, offices cannot work at full steam. The average office can work with 25-60% of its staff while maintaining a two-metre (six-foot) distance between workers. Offices which span more than five floors rely on lifts; the queues for access, when only two people are allowed inside one, can stretch around the block.
Some offices are trying to make themselves safer places to work. The managers of a new skyscraper in London, 22 Bishopsgate, have switched off its recirculated air-conditioning. Others have installed hand-sanitising stations and put up plastic barriers. But even if offices are safer, it can still be hard to get there. Many employees do not want to or are discouraged from using public transport—and one-quarter of commuters in New York City live more than 15 miles (24km) from the office, too far to walk or cycle.
However it also appears to be the case that working from home can make people happier. A paper published in 2017 in the American Economic Review found that workers were willing to accept an 8% pay cut to work from home, suggesting it gives them non-monetary benefits. Average meeting lengths appear to decline (see chart 2). And people commute less, or not at all. That is great for wellbeing. A study from 2004 by Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University and colleagues found that commuting was among the least enjoyable activities that people regularly did. Britain’s Office for National Statistics has found that “commuters have lower life satisfaction...lower levels of happiness and higher anxiety on average than non-commuters” (see article).
The working-from-home happiness boost could, in turn, make workers more productive. In most countries the average worker reports that, under lockdown, she got more done than she would have in the office. In the current circumstances, however, it is hard to be sure whether home-working or office-working is more efficient. Many people, particularly women, have had to work while caring for children who would normally be in school. That might make it seem as though working from home was less productive than it could theoretically be (ie, when the kids were in school).
Tumble outta bed into the kitchen
But there are lockdown-specific effects which create the opposite bias, making work-from-home seem artificially productive. During lockdown workers may have upped their game for fear of being let go by their company—evidence from America suggests that more than half of workers are worried about losing their job due to the outbreak. A separate problem is that most studies under lockdown have relied on workers to self-report their productivity, and the data generated in this way tend not to be very reliable.
Research published before the pandemic provides a clearer picture. A study in 2015 by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and his colleagues looked at Chinese call-centre workers. They found that those who worked from home were more productive (they processed more calls). One-third of the increase was due to having a quieter environment. The rest was due to people working more hours. Sick days for employees plummeted. Another study, looking at workers at America’s Patent and Trademark Office, found similar results. A study in 2007 from America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics found that home-workers are paid a tad more than equivalent office workers, suggesting higher productivity.
The experience of lockdown has simply accelerated pre-existing trends, thinks Harry Badham, the developer of 22 Bishopsgate. That may be an understatement. Although the share of people regularly working from home was rising before the pandemic, absolute numbers remained small (see chart 3). According to one view, the fact that office-working was so dominant until recently reveals that it must be more efficient than home-based work both for firms and for workers. By this logic the success of a country’s emergence from lockdown can be measured by how many people are back at their desks.
But there is another interpretation. This says that home-working is actually more efficient than office-work, and that the glory days of the office are gone. The office, after all, came into being when the world of work involved processing lots of paper. The fact that it remained so dominant for so long may instead reflect a market failure. Before covid-19 the world may have been stuck in a “bad equilibrium” in which home-work was less prevalent than it should have been. The pandemic represents an enormous shock which is putting the world into a new, better equilibrium.
Brent Neiman of the University of Chicago suggests three factors which prevented the growth of home-working before now. The first relates to information. Bosses simply did not know whether clustering in an office was essential or not. The past six months have let them find out. The second relates to co-ordination: it may have been difficult for a single firm unilaterally to move to home-working, perhaps because its suppliers or clients would have found it strange. The pandemic, however, forced all firms who could do so to shift to home-working all at once. Amid this mass migration, people were less likely to look askance at companies which did so.
The third factor is to do with investment. The large fixed costs associated with moving from office- to home-based work may have dissuaded firms from trying it out. Evidence from surveys suggests that firms have in recent months spent big on equipment such as laptops to enable staff to work from home; this is one reason why global trade has held up better than expected since the pandemic began (see article). Such investments are made at the household level too. In many rich countries the market for single-family houses is stronger than for apartments. This suggests that people are looking for extra space, possibly for a dedicated home office.
Pour yourself a cup of ambition
The extent to which home-working remains popular long after the pandemic has passed will depend on a bargain between companies and workers. But it will also depend on whether companies embrace or reject the controversial theory that working from an office might actually impede productivity. Since the 1970s researchers who have studied physical proximity (ie, the distance employees need to travel to engage in a face-to-face interaction) have disagreed on the question of whether it facilitates or inhibits collaboration. The argument largely centres on the extent to which the bringing-together of people under one roof promotes behaviour conducive to new ideas, or whether doing so promotes idle chatter.
Such uncertainty is exemplified by a study in 2017 by Matthew Claudel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit) and his colleagues. Their study looked at papers and patents produced by mit researchers and the geographical distribution of those researchers. In doing so, they found a positive relationship between proximity and collaboration. But when they looked at the buildings of mit, they found little statistical evidence for the hypothesis that “centrally positioned, densely populated and multi-disciplinary spaces would be active hotspots of collaboration”. In other words, proximity can help people come up with new ideas, but they do not necessarily need to be in an office to do so.
However, not everything about working from home is pleasurable. In July a study from economists at Harvard, Stanford and New York University found that the average workday under lockdown was nearly 50 minutes longer than it was before, and that people became more likely to send emails after work hours. There is also wide variation between workers in how much they enjoy working from home. Leesman, a workforce consultancy, has surveyed the experience of more than 100,000 white-collar workers across the rich world during the pandemic. It finds that satisfaction with working from home varies according to whether that person has dedicated office and desk space or not.
The tide’s turned and rolling your way
And not everyone has the ability to work from home, even if they want to. Research published in April by Mr Neiman and Jonathan Dingel, both of the University of Chicago, found that across rich countries about 40% of the workforce were in occupations that could plausibly be completed from their kitchen tables. Evidence of actual working arrangements during the pandemic backs up those speculations. A paper from Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University and colleagues, looking at American data, suggests that of those employed before the pandemic began, about half were working from home in May.
Indeed, it is uncertain whether the benefits of working from home can last for a sustained period of time. Mr Bloom’s co-written study on Chinese call-centre workers is one of the few to assess the impact of working from home over many months. He and his colleagues found that, eventually, many people were desperate to get back to the office, if only every now and then, in part because they were lonely. Some companies which have tried large-scale remote working in the past have ultimately abandoned it, including Yahoo, a technology firm, in 2013. “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings,” a leaked internal memo read that year.
The challenge for bosses, then, is to find ways of preserving and boosting employee happiness and innovation, even as home-working becomes more common. One solution is to get everyone into the office a few days a month. An approach whereby workers dedicate a chunk of time to developing new ideas with colleagues may actually be more productive than before.
A study from Christoph Riedl of Northeastern University and Anita Williams Woolley of Carnegie Mellon University, published in 2017, suggested that “bursty” communication, where people exchange ideas rapidly for a short period of time, led to better performance than constant, but less focused, communication. Not much evidence exists that serendipity is useful for innovation, even though it is accepted by many as a self-evident truth. “A lot of people made a lot of money selling this watercooler idea,” says Mr Claudel of mit, referring to the growth in recent decades of open-plan offices, co-working spaces and trendy “innovation districts”.
Coming into the office now and then is not the only way of generating bursty communication. The same can be achieved, say, with corporate retreats and get-togethers. Gitlab, a software company, has been “all-remote” since it was founded in 2014. With no offices, it gathers together its 1,300 “team members”, who live in 65 different countries, at least once a year for get-togethers and team bonding.
Similarly, companies such as Teemly, Sococo and Pragli offer “virtual offices”, making it easier to communicate with colleagues, rather than going through the rigmarole of scheduling a video call. Using video messaging from Loom, a worker can record her screen, voice and face and instantly share it with colleagues—more useful than a conventional video call, as the video can be sped up or rewound. Gitlab’s workers follow a “nonlinear” workday—interrupting work with bouts of leisure. Rather than talk to their colleagues over live video calls they engage in “asynchronous communication”, which is another way of saying they send their co-workers pre-recorded video messages.
More frequent working from home will also demand the use of new hardware, and the withering away of other sorts. At present, many companies host large data-centres, but these have proved less efficient as more people work from home. Goldman Sachs reckons that investment in traditional data infrastructure will fall by 3% a year in 2019-25. In its place, companies are likely to spend more on technology which allows workers to replicate the experience of being in the same physical space as someone else (higher-quality cameras and microphones, for instance). The more utopian technology analysts reckon that within five years, people will be able to put on a vr headset and immerse themselves in a virtual office—bad strip-lighting, and all.
There’s a better life
All this has wide-ranging implications for public policy. At present it is impossible to know whether home-workers will find it easier or harder to bargain with their employer for pay rises and improvements in conditions, though the idea of asking for a raise through a video chat is hardly an appealing one. Employers may also find it easier to fire remote workers than if they had to do it face-to-face. If so, then calls may grow for governments to give home-workers greater protections.
Another problem relates to employment law, argues Jeremias Adams-Prassl of Oxford University. Just as the rise of the gig economy has prompted questions and court cases about what it means to be an employee or self-employed, the increased popularity of home-working puts pressure on laws which were constructed around the assumption that people would be toiling away in an office. No one has yet thought through how firms should go about monitoring contractual working time in a world where nobody physically clocks in, nor about the extent to which firms may surveil workers at home.
Battles over employers’ responsibilities to their home-workers surely cannot be far away. Should a business pay for a worker’s internet connection or their heating in the dead of winter? Grappling with such questions will not be easy. But governments and firms must seize the moment. The pandemic, for all its ill effects, offers a rare opportunity to rewire the world of work. ■
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "What a way to make a living"
Most people associate the office with routine and conformity, but it is fast becoming a source of economic uncertainty and heated dispute. Around the world workers, bosses, landlords and governments are trying to work out if the office is obsolete—and are coming to radically different conclusions.
Some 84% of French office workers are back at their desks, but less than 40% of British ones are. Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, says the company’s staff can work from home “forever” but Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, says home-working is “a pure negative”.
As firms dither, the $30trn global commercial-property market is stalked by fears of a deeper slump. And while some workers dream of a Panglossian future without commutes and Pret A Manger, others wonder about the threat to promotions, pay and job security.
The disagreement reflects uncertainty about how effective social distancing will be and how long it will take before a covid-19 vaccine is widely available. But it is about more than that: the pandemic has revealed just how many offices were being run as relics of the 20th century, even as it triggered the mass-adoption of technologies that can transform white-collar work. As a result the covid calamity will prompt a long-overdue phase of technological and social experimentation, neither business as usual nor a fatal blow to the office. This era holds promise but also brings threats, not least to companies’ cultures. Instead of resisting change, governments need to update antiquated employment laws and begin reimagining city centres.
Two hundred years ago steam power brought workers to factories where they could use new machines. As corporate giants emerged in the late 19th century, staff were needed to administer them. They held planning meetings and circulated memos, invoices and other paperwork to record what they had done. All this required workers to be close together and created the pattern of people commuting by car or train in order to meet in a central office.
This system always had glaring shortcomings, some of which have become worse over time. Most people hate the hassle and expense of commuting, which eats up over four hours a week for the average American worker. Some dislike the noise and formality of offices, or suffer from discrimination within them. Office-bound workers find it harder to look after their children, a growing issue as more families have two working parents.
You might think that new technologies would have shaken up this unsatisfactory status quo. After all, the pdf electronic document was born in 1991, the cost of bandwidth collapsed in the 2000s, and Zoom and Slack, two firms whose technology powers remote working, are both nearly a decade old. Yet inertia has allowed the office to escape serious disruption. Before covid-19 struck, for example, flexible-office companies (including the troubled WeWork) had a tiny global market share of under 5%. Most businesses were unwilling to switch wholesale to remote-working technologies before their clients did; or to write off sunk costs in the form of property assets and leases.
Covid-19 has upended all this. Before the pandemic only 3% of Americans worked from home regularly; now a huge number have tried it. Even Xerox, a firm synonymous with office printers spewing unread pages, has many of its staff working from home. As more people adopt remote-working technologies there is a powerful network effect, with each new customer making the service more useful. Together Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet and Cisco Webex now have well over 300m users.
Bureaucratic hurdles to remote work have been blasted out of the way. Civil courts are operating remotely. Notaries have gone online and some banks have eliminated the need for new customers to enter a branch to confirm their identity and open an account.
How much of this change will stick when a vaccine arrives? The best available guide is from countries where the virus is under control. There the picture is of an “optional office”, which people attend, but less frequently. In Germany, for example, 74% of office workers now go to their place of work, but only half of them are there five days a week, according to surveys by Morgan Stanley. The exact balance will depend on the industry and city. In places with easy commutes more workers will go to the office; megacities with long, expensive journeys may see fewer.
Companies will have to adapt to this pattern of sporadic attendance in which the office is a hub, not a second home. There is a risk that over time a firm’s social capital erodes, creativity flags, hierarchies ossify and team spirit fades, as Mr Hastings fears (see article). The answer is more targeted staff interactions, with groups gathering at specific times to refresh friendships and swap information. New technologies that “gamify” online interactions to prompt spontaneity may eventually supersede the stilted world of Zoom. As they retool their cultures firms will need to rejig their property: sober investors expect a reduction of at least 10% in the stock of office space in big cities. With the typical corporate lease lasting at least half a decade, this will take time to play out.
First, a vast corpus of employment law will need to be modernised. Already the gig economy has shown that it is out of date. Now new prickly questions about workers’ rights and responsibilities loom: can firms monitor remote workers to assess their productivity? Who is liable if employees injure themselves at home? Any sense that white-collar workers are getting perks will create simmering resentment in the rest of the workforce.
The second priority is city centres. For a century they have been dominated by towers filled with swivel chairs and tonnes of yellowing paper. Now complex urban-planning rules will need a systematic overhaul to allow buildings and districts to be redeveloped for new uses, including flats and recreation. If you step back into the office this month, sit down and log on to your computer—but don’t get too comfortable.■
Covid-19 is here to stay. People will have to adapt
Jul 2nd 2020
Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub
It is astonishing how rapidly the pandemic has spread, despite all the efforts to stop it. On February 1st, the day covid-19 first appeared on our front cover, the World Health Organisation counted 2,115 new cases. On June 28th its daily tally reached 190,000. That day as many new cases were notched up every 90 minutes as had been recorded in total by February 1st.
The world is not experiencing a second wave: it never got over the first. Some 10m people are known to have been infected. Pretty much everywhere has registered cases (Turkmenistan and North Korea have not, though, like Antarctica). For every country such as China, Taiwan and Vietnam, which seems to be able to contain the virus, there are more, in Latin America and South Asia, where it is raging. Others, including the United States, are at risk of losing control or, in much of Africa, in the early phase of their epidemic. Europe is somewhere in between.
The worst is to come. Based on research in 84 countries, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reckons that, for each recorded case, 12 go unrecorded and that for every two covid-19 deaths counted, a third is misattributed to other causes. Without a medical breakthrough, it says, the total number of cases will climb to 200m-600m by spring 2021. At that point, between 1.4m and 3.7m people will have died. Even then, well over 90% of the world’s population will still be vulnerable to infection—more if immunity turns out to be transient.
The actual outcome depends on how societies manage the disease. Here the news is better. Epidemiologists understand how to stop covid-19. You catch it indoors, in crowds, when people raise their voices. The poor are vulnerable, as are the elderly and those with other conditions. You can contain the virus with three tactics: changes in behaviour; testing, tracing and isolation; and, if they fail, lockdowns. The worse a country is at testing—and many governments have failed to build enough capacity—the more it has to fall back on the other two. Good public health need not be expensive. Dharavi, a slum of 850,000 people in Mumbai, tamed an outbreak (see article).
Treatments have improved, thanks to research and dealing with patients. Although mass vaccination is still months away at best (see article), the first therapies are available. More is known about how to manage the disease—don’t rush to put people on respirators, do give them oxygen early. Better treatment helps explain why the share of hospital patients who went on to be admitted to intensive care fell in Britain from 12% at the end of March to 4% in mid to late May.
And economies have adapted. They are still suffering, of course. J.P. Morgan, a bank, predicts that the peak-to-trough decline in the first half of the year in the 39 economies it follows will be around 10% of gdp. But workers stuck in Zoom hell have discovered that they can get a surprising amount done from home.
In China Starbucks designed “contactless” ordering, cutting the time customers spend in its coffee shops. Supply chains that struggled now run smoothly. Factories have found ways to stagger shifts, shield staff behind plastic and change work patterns so that personal contact is minimised.
Now that nationwide lockdowns are done, governments can make sensible trade-offs—banning large indoor gatherings, say and allowing the reopening of schools and shops. Sometimes, as in some American states, they will loosen too much and have to reverse course. Others will learn from their mistakes.
The problem is that, without a cure or a vaccine, containment depends on people learning to change their behaviour. After the initial covid-19 panic, many are becoming disenchanted and resistant. Masks help stop the disease, but in Europe and America some refuse to wear one because they see them as emasculating or, worse, Democratic. Thorough handwashing kills the virus, but who has not relapsed into bad old habits? Parties are dangerous but young people cooped up for months have developed a devil-may-care attitude. Most important, as the months drag on, people just need to earn some money. In the autumn, as life moves indoors, infections could soar.
Changing social norms is hard. Just look at aids, known for decades to be prevented by safe sex and clean needles. Yet in 2018, 1.7m people were newly infected with hiv, the virus that causes it. Covid-19 is easier to talk about than aids, but harder to avoid. Wearing a mask is chiefly about protecting others; the young, fit and asymptomatic are being asked to follow tedious rules to shield the old and infirm.
Changing behaviour requires clear communication from trusted figures, national and local. But many people do not believe their politicians. In countries such as America, Iran, Britain, Russia and Brazil, which have the highest caseloads, presidents and prime ministers minimised the threat, vacillated, issued bad advice or seemed more interested in their own political fortunes than in their country—sometimes all at once.
Covid-19 is here for a while at least. The vulnerable will be afraid to go out and innovation will slow, creating a 90% economy that consistently fails to reach its potential. Many people will fall ill and some of them will die. You may have lost interest in the pandemic. It has not lost interest in you. ■
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This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "The way we live now"
