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For many people returning to their offices after more than three months in lockdown, doing so will be like visiting the ruins of a bygone era. Working from home, call it distributed work, remote work or work from anywhere, is definitely here to stay.
No matter how much we spend on partitions, colored safety distance stickers, or hydro-alcoholic gel dispensers, many of us will never return to the office on a regular basis, and will move on to systematically perform most of our tasks from other locations. Obviously, this will not be the case for everybody: some people require specific machines and to be in certain locations and cannot consider it, but according to most studies, they are now a minority.
Studies carried out at MIT or Stanford prove not only that the trend exists and has taken root, but that we are facing the development of a new economy based on remote working as the basis of greater productivity and even higher levels of innovation and creativity.
The news also makes it very clear what is happening: technology companies, leading the way, are letting their office leasing contracts expire, reducing the number of their headquarters, and remodeling them instead as places for socializing and for occasional meetings. Others have announced permanent plans for remote working and are testing the workforce to assess their ability to adapt to such arrangements. We are entering the age of hybrid or liquid work, replacing the simplistic idea from the end of the last century of just sending workers home. No, in the future we will work from wherever we want, but we will have many different reasons for coming to the office, which will be accommodated in formats and furniture that are very different from those of today.
What’s more, working remotely is not endless boring video conference meetings. Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and similar tools are simply an attempt to move the most recognizable parts of our work from one channel to another. As time goes by and we learn more about countries such as the Netherlands or Finland, which started this trend many years before the pandemic arrived, we realize the enormous importance of asynchronous versus synchronous communication, and above all, how the latter enslaves us while the former sets us free. Tools such as Slack have seen a sharp rise in use in many companies, enabling us to share documents and replace synchronous meetings with much more efficient and productive approaches.
Many of us are now relearning how to work, leaving behind not only many unproductive hours a year sitting behind a steering wheel and contributing to traffic jams, but also many psychological habits dating back to the industrial revolution, centuries ago: dependence on the workplace, surveillance and micromanagement, or fixed and supposedly inflexible timetables based on some kind of divine mandate. But no we’ve seen that we can do things so much better, and in much more efficient and satisfactory ways.
The sooner we rethink offices, the sooner we will start to save money on rent (not just on offices, but on parking) — and more importantly, to provide the workforce with better ways of doing things — and the sooner we will be part of an evolution that will be the way things are done in the future.
Let’s be clear: working remotely, in fact, has long been not only perfectly possible, but the way forward. The pandemic has simply accelerated that transition.