Workplaces must use lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic to inform an entirely new way to approach work, workplace, working life and productivity, says a new study by think-tank Demos' Workshift Commission, The Nowhere Office.
The report offers a radical alternative to ‘business as usual’ when lockdown ends,
including the way the government handles work-related policy. This includes the taxation rules applicable to employees who face work-related energy bills and pay for costly commuting fares.
The report argues that as we return to post-pandemic working life, fixed time and place will no longer be the defining pillars of work for traditional office workers, with the pandemic having proved that going back full time to an office may be neither productive economically or culturally desirable.
Chair of the Demos Workshift Commission, Julia Hobsbawm, says we should embrace the World Health Organisation’s complete definition of health, and focus on Social Health in the workplace.
She also suggests that the UK should raise productivity and engagement through a purpose-led agenda which acknowledges that work-life and home-life must be far more aligned in a hybrid model where possible.
Ms Hobsbawm suggests it is unlikely that there will be or should be a full return to presenteeism-based office life, and that leadership and management culture must embrace this change or perpetuate a cycle of low productivity and epidemic workplace stress.
Ms Hobsbawm, Chair of the Demos Workshift Commission and author of The Nowhere
Office , said, "The world of work has changed hugely in the last year and yet when you look closely you can see that it is a world which has been crying out for change for far longer than that."
“Everyone wants jobs but they want something else too: meaning. Work-Life balance. In
other words, a workshift.”
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Students at Great Academy Ashton are taken through the Covid testing proceedure, as the school prepares for its reopening on March 8, in Ashton-Under-Lyne, England. AP Photo -
People walk over London Bridge during rush hour in London. Reuters -
Masked customers shop for groceries inside Amazon's new Amazon Fresh store in Ealing, west London. AFP -
A Covid testing area is constructed at Great Academy Ashton, as the school prepares for its reopening, in Ashton-Under-Lyne. AP Photo -
Britain's Health Secretary Matt Hancock during a visit to the Centre for Virus Research at Glasgow University in Glasgow, Scotland. AP Photo -
A teacher takes a Covid-19 lateral flow test in the sports hall of Park Lane Academy in Halifax, northwest England, as the school prepares to reopen. AFP -
A quiet London Bridge during rush hour in London. Reuters -
Year 9 students take part in an online class at Park Lane Academy in Halifax. AFP
“The pandemic has lit the touchpaper on discussions which need to be had and change which needs to happen. I hope that we are catalysts for such discussion and indeed badly-needed change,” she added.
The report says that looking forward, we should be campaigning for a new way to pay for time spent working, based potentially loosely around set hours, but much more firmly around set outcomes, with flexibility, autonomy and experimentation priced in.
Also, that leadership and management culture needs to embrace a complete end to
presenteeism and a redrawing of what success looks like. It also calls for a Commission on Social Health that will examine what the modern metrics of work should be.
