More Productivity, but Fewer Jobs – The Great Challenge of Remote Working in the Post-COVID-19 World
The equation "remote working = fewer jobs" will have to be solved sooner or later.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had the effect of accelerating the change in the way we work. While many companies were still reluctant to telework just before the pandemic began in 2020, the situation has changed dramatically today.
Forced to let their employees telecommute so as not to stop their activities, companies have had to adapt like everyone else in this particular period.
Although the variants are multiplying and the pandemic waves are following one another, there will inevitably come a time when the health crisis will end. I can't tell you when, but it will happen. That is a certainty. At that point, a big question will arise:
What will be left of remote working once this health crisis is behind us?
There are many different views on this question. That is the least we can say! The first thing that jumps out is that we are often blinded by our immediate environment. When it is confined or remote working is mandatory, we tend to be convinced that remote working is the future of work.
When the pandemic wave subsides, and we are free again, everyone rushes back to the office to renew physical contact, and we bury telework in the process.
However, if we take a step back, we can see a strong trend for the future: remote working in small doses, one or two days a week, will become the norm in the future.
The second question this raises is about productivity:
What will be the effect of this one to two days of remote working for all on productivity?
Despite two years of in vivo experience, not much has emerged so far beyond discussions at the coffee machine. When it is allowed of course...
But there are some interesting things to remember:
Remote working, chosen and not undergone, seems to have a positive impact on the well-being of employees.
It reduces travel time: fewer hours lost and less fatigue.
It allows companies to reduce their need for office space and thus to make significant savings.
All this is empirical, as it is difficult to measure. We will have to wait and see what happens over time after the health crisis and even after the health crisis. We will have to wait for the return to normal to know if there will be a “new normal”.
On the business side, there is already a certainty that appears in the background.
They have learned a lot during these two years of pandemic and more or less forced remote working. If growth were to falter, they will not hesitate to use all the new productivity levers they have discovered during the health crisis.
Here are at least three of them:
Remote working has encouraged the explosion of digitalization which will encourage the reduction, or even the disappearance, of certain tasks and therefore of part of the work.
Remote working has allowed companies, especially large ones, to discover who was “essential” within the company and who was not, and this will have consequences on employment.
Remote working has opened the way to access to “delocalized” and therefore less expensive employment in professions that had not considered it.
Final Thoughts
At present, the equation “remote working = fewer jobs” that may arise in the future does not yet require a solution. We are still in a period of shortage and imbalance between job supply and demand. However, the question will sooner or later come up when the dust settles. And that's when companies will look to activate all the productivity-enhancing levers discovered during this COVID-19 pandemic.
So remote working will indeed boost productivity ... for companies by reducing the number of jobs as well as the number of square feet of office space. Not quite the way one would imagine remote working would improve things.
This will be one of the great challenges of the next world. A future world, which is not talked about much these days. As if some people feel that it will not be idyllic…
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