(14 March 2021) A lot of fuss about the royals this week. I have no particular comments to make- many have been made by people cleverer than I (and probably even more by those who are not). All I can say is that have great respect and love for them (as much as they do for me).
As we blink slowly into the light of a post lockdown world the papers are full of articles about WFH being the new norm. This is fine for journalists who have always been flexible but is it actually going to make sense?
I delved into the statistics. The UK workforce is around 32.21 million. It is obvious that many jobs cannot be done at home. Obvious examples are agriculture, arts and recreation, construction, health and social care, manufacturing, retailing, transport, etc. My crude sums give me just under 21 million working in these industry sectors, or nearly 65% of the working population. Of all the rest I simply assumed that 25% of jobs in all other sectors could not be done as WFH. I therefore conclude that WFH could only work for around 8 million people or just over a quarter (26.7%) of the workforce.
Does this matter? I think it does. It has proved useful in lockdown for keeping people employed but as a lifestyle?
Some established workers could benefit from some more flexibility it is true.
However, the eagerness of large employers to embrace this as a model for the future is a concern as I am not sure whose interests it serves (I know that really it is for them, not you)
Thus:
- You lose proper benefits of face-to-face contact, reading body language and chance conversations over the water machine of other communal places.
- You lose some of those bonding elements such as birthday cakes and occasional socialising over lunch or after work
- It is not so easy to test out casual “Lightbulb” moments or check a difficulty if colleagues are remote.
- Monitoring is likely to become more intrusive
- It is fine if you live in a place that is large enough for an “office”; but we have the smallest properties in Europe and continue to build to such standards. Living and working in a room in a shared property could become quite tedious.
- I think that when an employer talks about a “flexible workforce” it is shorthand for “cruelly exploited”.
I think we will see a growth in shared workspaces where facilities are used by many different people but even so this is a slightly dystopian model of a near future world where a quarter of the population float around in cyberspace supported by all the people who have to make the physical world work.
Below a link to my pictures of February
https://www.flickr.com/photos/192170036@N05/albums/72157718596218382
And my picture of the month
