It sounds exciting, but the grass may not be as green as we all hope it to be.
The travails of Covid-19 - still washing over us as I write - have led to a rousing cry from the Internet echo chamber for companies to do more to allow their employees to work from home, or "WFH." Every second post in my LinkedIn feed, for example, is celebrating this movement and cheering it on.
Bravo to this. It is absolutely necessary in the current situation and it's also high time that the world of full time work caught on to the possibilities and recognised how things have changed. People need more flexibility to cope with the demands of family and the less structured work day. And the technology (mostly) exists to facilitate this.
“The fact that technology offers us a new option doesn't mean that we always have to take it."
In health terms, we don't know how dangerous workplaces will be in the medium term, when the worst of this virus is over but before a vaccine exists. Will they be germ factories that we must avoid if we possibly can? There could always be another virus, so a defining change in workplace usage might be forced upon us.
Ignoring that possibility, there is this debate about WFH. In all the heat and light about it, a few things are being lost. It seems that for fear of uttering a heresy, nobody is asking the elephant in the room question: When COVID-19 is behind us, do we all want to work from home all the time? Personally, I doubt it.
First: One of the regular complaints about modern working life is work-life-balance. The complaint is, more or less, that nowadays you never stop working. WFH would seem to help with this issue. And it does, up to a point, by increasing flexibility, reducing commute times and allowing for some greater personal freedom. But I've had a home office for many years, and here's what happens: You get a different work-life-balance problem to the one you had before. If you work from home all the time, the risk is that you never stop working. Your office is there just a few steps away and, unless you are very careful, you are always checking email, responding to messages and doing calls at all hours. So it's possible that we will end up with the same work-life balance as we have now, just reached by a different route.
Second: Humans are social creatures, and the advent of digital technology hasn't yet evolved that away. It is still easier in terms of relationship development and more effective in terms of work activity if you can walk across the floor or down the corridor and talk to a work colleague face-to-face. I am regularly standing in front of groups of people where the endemic complaint is about managing remote workforces - my boss is in Hong Kong; my team is in Bangalore; my key stakeholders are in Tokyo and it's all really hard to manage. If everyone works from home, then ALL workforces are remote. It can't be both the problem and the solution.
Third: I don't care what anyone says. The galaxy of technology required to execute on this is still not ready for full-time ubiquitous use. By "galaxy" I mean everything: communication platforms, internet speed, hardware compatibility (speakers, microphones etc) and all the rest. (Case in point: Covid-19 has been a huge boost to the Zoom platform, but major security and privacy concerns are now emerging about that service.) Just about every time I take part in a virtual meeting with more than two attendees, the first several minutes, at least, is spent sorting it all out. He is on mute and she is frozen. He has installed a duck-image filter and he doesn't know how to remove it. Often there has to be a side-discussion by WhatsApp or something, and frequently the call has to be reinitiated on another platform. In other words, the imagined efficiency isn't there.
I'm all for embracing technology, but the choice to do so has to be ours, not technology's. In other words, the fact that technology offers us a new option doesn't mean that we always have to take it. Nobody knows what the world will look like after Covid-19. So let's not stampede to the conclusion that it must be a WFH future.
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