The move to a reasonable percentage of the population working from home was sudden and unplanned, for very good reasons, and the ensuing discussion that started almost from day one around both the benefits and disadvantages continues.
There are two things to remember when contributing to the debate.
Firstly, and similar to almost every other topic, your personal circumstances will influence your viewpoint.
You may be a property investor suddenly sitting on a portfolio of empty office blocks, or a commuter saved the expense travelling five days a week, every week. You may be someone concerned about climate change (and if you're not, why not) who can see that reducing unnecessary travel is not only better for people, but for the planet too.
You may be a parent for whom home working enables you to contribute to more family life, or perhaps someone who thinks a move to home working has enabled you to get away with doing less, although in that case I'd argue it's poor management rather than home working which has enabled that to happen.
In short, what works well for you, may not work well for everyone.
Secondly, this is not the new normal. Our homes being our primary place of work and and leisure seven days a week for months on end is not normal. The closure of WiFi enabled places to meet and work such as libraries, coffee shops and cafes is not normal. Not seeing many of your team members face-to-face for a whole year is not normal.
Some of the negatives expressed around home working are as a result of these temporary factors, not home working itself.
So I write this with both those factors in mind, following a year that has seen my team and I work from home 99% of the time, but also be the most productive we've ever been. Many people in public service are in a similar position, but to conflate the two statements without proper analysis I think is premature.
Given the circumstances of the past year I've no doubt that it would have been the busiest for many public servants across the country even if they had been in the office 100% of the time.
Yes, home working probably has contributed to greater productivity, but there's a long way to go and to declare how we've worked in lockdown a success and the only way forward is premature.
Much like publishing a PDF on website and calling it digital transformation, moving meetings from face-to-face to Zoom or Teams and declaring it the new way of working ignores the benefits that might be achieved from rethinking how things happen around the digital platforms and tools available to workforce.
Beyond that though organisations need to take a holistic view about the future of their workplace, and it's worth remembering that some things just work better face-to-face, particularly creative tasks that involve a multidisciplinary team coming together.
Tomorrow is 29 March 2021 and England sees the start of the measured lifting of restrictions.
As organisations and their staff start to change how they work again, remind yourself that the past twelve months weren't the new normal, that home vs office working shouldn't be a binary choice and that there are benefits to both, and most of all that just moving meetings online isn't a new way of working.
Society has once in a lifetime opportunity to rethink how we work over the next few months. For the benefit of employers and employees let's make the new, new normal the best it can be.
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