Work From Home: The Way to the New Normal
The last four months have been one of the most challenging periods of human history and certainly the most challenging in modern times. The pandemic has not only brought the world to its knees with a massive healthcare crisis sweeping like wildfire across the globe but the ensuing economic downturn has pushed the global communities not only face the loss of lives but livelihoods. For a world that has evolved to be densely interconnected in the areas of business, supply-chain, markets and labour, this unique challenge turned everything that the modern society held as strength, into their vulnerabilities. The core value of humanity as a socially interconnected species came under fire as the COVID19 marched on. Never before the global communities had to take a fall for standing together. As the blaze of the contagion engulfed the whole planet, the governments and the business communities responded to the COVID crisis with alternate ways to run the economy by embracing social distancing, work from home and a complete restructuring of the global supply chain.
Every crisis the society faces allows it to revaluate their existing values and systems in the light of the recent barometric pressure. Likewise, the last four months during the current COVID crisis has given us a paradigm shift in the way we envision our ways to operate business and communities. It has allowed us to extensively test our existing technological capabilities in all areas of the economy to rephrase the term business as usual. With the 4th Industrial Revolution gaining stream through automation and data-driven economy, the service industry leapt to discard the age-old system and tread into the uncertain waters of remote working. From the IT Enabled Services to many other areas of knowledge industries put in motion its ecosystem to cater to the new model called Work From Home. The Work From Home model enabled both the high and low skilled knowledge workers to continue their delivery from the safety of their residence while exercising social distancing. This new way of life not only helped the community restore the livelihood with relative safety, but it also came with a bunch of perks that have long-lasting effects both on a personal and community front:
The absence of a daily commute freed up time on a personal level for the individuals to invest in self-development or family. This appears to be an enriching experience for people as many blew the dust off some old hobbies and ignited long-forgotten passions. Be it painting or music, online courses to develop new skills or spending quality time with family, Work From Home has, in some way, saved us the time, energy and money we spent in reaching to work and back.
It freed many of us from the constraints of 9 to 7 routine and implement flexible working hours to accommodate a variety of activities within and outside work while improving the productivity manifold based on the individual niche.
The absence of maintaining/renting physical office space and utilities can be attributed to the improvement of the bottom-line figures for organizations in service industries as such overheads occupy a significant proportion of the operational cost for businesses. This freed up capital is a vital element for the resilience built-up for the organization as they can be reinvested as a reserve or as improvement and empowering of the human resource of the organizations.
The business continuity during these four months has proven that the business can run without extensive travelling for negotiating deals, meetings, reviews and knowledge transfer or business transition. It makes us more capable to optimize our current technology in place to work all such areas remotely from the comfort of our homes without incurring any extra cost in international or domestic travelling which not only improves the bottom-lines but reduces the carbon footprint of the businesses.
Work From Home makes the maintenance/renting office building redundant thus it reduces the scale of the demand for Special Economic Zones or corporate parks which intern lets the society find better and more environmental-friendly use of the landmass now available due to the reduction of industrial demands.
With the movement of work from secured office space to homes, the concern of information security is gradually taking the forefront of the business strategies which is opening up more and more opportunities since there are a much larger scope and necessity of creating and maintaining breach-less data security protocols for the business. This drive for a stronger standard of information security will make the digital world safer by expanding the scope of competitive innovation driven by the necessity.
The social cumulated carbon foot-print will reduce drastically as the per-capita allotment of infrastructure (internet, power, space) will go down as knowledge workers are expected to work from home. This process, in a way, fast tracks the benefit of the shared economy as one internet connection and utilities will be used per employee to accommodate their personal and professional requirements.
With a reduced need for professional migration, urban cities will not be overcrowded or deplete environmental capital while at the same time regional cultures will be saved from erosion due to brain-drain caused by economic exodus.
Needless to say, that the Work From Home model is far from perfect. It’s in the process of incremental improvement like any organic/cultural response to changing environment generally is. The absence of robust infrastructure in many Asian states and the absence of the idea of a workplace within the walls we call home are some of the infrastructural and cultural hurdles the society is yet to cross. But having said that, Real Estate projects have already started offering residences designed with Work From Home in mind and consumer goods from clothing to working desks are floating new products to make us build our identity waist up. The magic of the free market lies in the spontaneous and dynamic nature of identifying inherent demand and filling in the gaps.
With four months behind us, the model seems to be developing resilience to disruptions from social and natural calamities as the workforce in the industries are being geographically diversified. With the recent success and the social benefits of the digital way of living, Work From Home is continuously striking blows to our status quo ante of doing business as we are beginning to question the relevance of many of the customs we had been following in the pre-COVID era. What has once been a far off and theoretical contingency plan is our best bet today to make a considerable change not to overcome the crisis and get back to the pre-COVID era but to carve out a new era of redefined values and vision with a more environment-friendly and cohesive approach because we not only owe it to our community, we owe it to our next generation… to pass on a safer and cleaner Earth for them to live.
