The world of work has changed forever.
What do I actually mean by this? Well, years ago I was in the world of the office worker. I spent a couple of decades in the corporate world where the idea of working from home was completely alien.
If you managed to get a job where one or two days a week involved you working from home, this was considered a lottery win. Why? Because it meant on those one or two days you could doss around in your pyjamas, do some work, maybe have a shower at lunchtime, and perhaps shave before going out in the evening. You see the issue is that companies never trusted people brackets (quite rightly then) to actually do a full days work.
Then along came a pesky pandemic. Suddenly, those companies that had people coming in to work in their offices every day, didn’t have them coming in every day any more. They either had to not do any work as a business, or to rethink their model. A rethink was exactly what they all did, and do you know what? They made it work!
You see the thing is all they ever needed to do was put key performance indicators in place and have a level of work they expected, targets etc, and ensure that the staff achieved this. Ultimately it didn’t really matter as long as they did a great job in front of their computer, even if they were working in their underpants with three days of stubble.
So what’s happening now is not only have companies seen that they can be as efficient, but they have actually found, many of them, that they can be more efficient without a lot of the costs of commercial premises, and without a lot of the politics associated with infighting and squabbling. Trust me, as an ex director and business owner within a corporate/office environment, I know!
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting for one minute but this is now a perfect situation. However, it is the situation that the corporate/office world works in now because it had to, and then found it could!
There are all sorts of negative connotations though of course, not in the least the effect that a lack of human contact is having. As I type this three years after the start of our pandemic experience, I have said all along, and still maintain, that the knock-on effect will have far reaching ramifications.
I’ve heard an awful lot of people say that they actually weren’t affected by the pandemic, but I personally believe that in one way or another, everybody was adversely affected by it, even if they don’t know it yet. There has certainly been a massive impact on the world of work, and I don’t believe that things will ever go back to the way they were.
Good thing or a bad thing?
Featured image by Jose Losada on Unsplash