The chief operating officer (COO) of a large private bank has been quite stressed with this new work-from-home culture. “ My weekends and late evenings earlier belonged to me. Not any more. Everyone assumes a little disturbance is not a big burden. End result: it is a nonending grind!” he told this writer with some foreboding of what is to come.
Working from home was a frowned-upon concept, often equated with work shirkers. Covid-19 has now redefined it as a more productive option that not only keeps corporate teams safe; but also keeps them working without glancing at the clock. As usual, it is the digital behemoths who have taken the lead in institutionalizing the ‘new normal’.
Twitter has led the way by saying that working-from-home will be ‘forever’. “So if our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen,” the social media giant said. Earlier, Google and Facebook said employees could opt to work from home till the end of the year. Facebook was among the first to get staff to work remotely and even rewarded them with $1,000 bonuses. For these companies the returns in savings on real estate costs are huge; and they are getting the opportunity to redesign their office space to the new norms without disruption.
Reshaping Offices
When we do go back to office, it will be a new realty there too. Expensive real estate has pushed corporate spaces towards open plan offices and other ‘efficiencies’ such as hot-desking and sleeping pods. The size of the work table has shrunk, while standard office space has also reduced by half to 50-70 sq ft per person. Despina Katsikakis, a consultant with the property advisory Cushman & Wakefield, and who helped get a million people back to office in China, told CNN that “the crisis has fast-forwarded the future of work by as much as a decade.”
Describing the new architecture as the ‘six-feet office’, design and etiquette have rapidly undergone a change to build in safety and create trust for those who want to return to work. Katsikakis says the six feet space between tables will now be the new norm while design consultancy Arcadis predicted an era of new disinfection infrastructure which makes it easy to sanitise everything. Companies are also investing in air filtration systems to reduce contaminants, while some are installing plexiglass sneeze guards at desks. Office etiquette in many ways will also change for the worse.
Coffee machine chatter, and contact appreciation like shaking hands or a squeeze of the arm are off the table. In the works are walking in one direction ‘clockwise’ so as to minimise contact and the risk of spreading germs. Regimentation, bad as it is in offices, may get worse. Heat scanners at entry. Two, long disciplined lines for the elevators, with just 4 in one trip. The cafeteria, the heart of social interaction, is now dead replaced by ‘takeaways’. Zaha Hadid Architects’ (ZHA) in Sharjah has designed new headquarters for the Bee’ahWaste Management Company in Sharjah, UAE,as “contactless pathways”, wherein employees will rarely have to touch a surface with their hands to navigate the building. Lifts can be called from a smartphone, avoiding pressing buttons, while office doors open automatically using facial recognition.
The zoom revolution
The biggest of revolutions has been the way we communicate. Forced into homes, and without any office support, corporate teams have created virtual offices and virtual conferences creating a boom in communication software. Microsoft Teams, a messaging and video conferencing program,had 75 million daily users at the beginning of May, a 70 per cent spike from the previous month. But the app that has taken the locked down world by storm is Zoom, developed by the Eric Yuan’s San Jose company.
Allowing upto 99 users to join a conference, the app was top of the pile by end March. App tracker Apptopia reported downloads of 2.13 million on March 23, the day many countries went into lockdown, compared to 56,000 downloads 2 months ago. It today hosts everything from church services to virtual classrooms, and even creates virtual parties! Its revenues have skyrocketed, and Zoom Video Conferencing’s share price at around $70 at the end of January, is currently touching $170, giving it a market capitalization of over $45 billion. The spike in workfrom- home and learn-fromhome applications and the related hardware to support it is one side of the picture. The other side is an emerging business work culture and technology of support to meet the crisis that is here to stay.