The Day After
How we are going to work and relate from now on? Uncertainties are aplenty and depend on many factors, and any forecasts are premature and risky.
At a time when the pace of the pandemic is showing the first signs of slowing down among us and when saturation makes us think more and more about the “day after”, it is inevitable to ask ourselves how we are going to work and relate from now on. Uncertainties are aplenty and depend on many factors, and any forecasts are premature and risky.
However, the signs are in our midst and, although tenuous, perhaps they are already pointing to some of the possible futures that lie ahead. I therefore suggest we formulate a few hypotheses as an exercise.
The return of the long run. It is increasingly clear that the consequences of this crisis may well go beyond everything that postwar-born generations have experienced. "Everything will work out fine", we claim to reassure ourselves. I want to believe it, but it will take time. And the best way to make sure it will happen is to have a clear vision of the future we want - “start with the end in view”, as Franklin Covey would say - and to persevere in it. This may take us back to habits of long-term planning that in the last decades we had exchanged for a more reactive and opportunistic approach to better respond to the turbulence and volatility in work environment and indeed in our lives. For this to be possible, however, we need a degree of consensus, from the local to the global level, that will help us keep ambiguity and volatility in check.
The surge of telepresence. When the restrictions are lifted, there will be, at first, an “explosion of socializing”: freed from confinement, we will want to recover in a short time all the time lost. (Or maybe not, if the relaxation is gradual). Then, little by little, some will miss the convenience of videoconferencing and working at home, the flexibility of schedules, the absence of traffic during peak hours, the healthier food. Others may remember that confinement led them to take advantage of technology to resume remote and hitherto neglected relationships. Companies will look at costs, and environmentalists will argue against the irrationality of business air travel. Physical production will become even more robotized. The memory of the risk of contagion may impair the popularity of shows and events for large crowds, and we’ll witness their gradual virtualization. We will return to the streets, but why not more often on foot and without leaving our neighbourhood? Or maybe, a few times a week, to visit a “proximity workspace” where we can exchange ideas and expand our networks?
Less gender discrimination. One of the reasons for the discrimination of women in the workplace is the absurd and lasting importance attached to physical presence as a token of productivity, which burdens them disproportionately and tilts the game board against them. The expansion of teleworking will be a death blow to that criterion and will help level the playing field. The reduction in professional travel will have a similar effect at the level of senior management. The simultaneous presence of men and women at home will facilitate a greater sharing of domestic tasks.
The stigma of age. The much greater vulnerability of older generations to the pandemic - not only of the elderly, but also of older working-age people (the latter still much greater than that of young people) - will weaken the discourse against ageism and bring about renewed discrimination. Why invest in older workers if, in the face of other eventual threats, we’ll have to shelter them again inside a glass dome instead of being able to count on them 100%? They will be the first group to eject to the periphery of virtualized work environments, so that we can claim that we continue to count them in and to value their contribution, but where it will also be easier to “turn off” their pointless jobs.
In some of their combinations, these hypotheses do not necessarily constitute a dystopian future. Neither does it mean that I would like them all to materialize. But they are plausible guesses, endowed with rationality, which it would be imprudent not to consider when composing the scenarios of the future that we will want to build.
And we have an alternative. Among the many sayings attributed to Peter Drucker, there is one that keeps surfacing in my mind: “The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different. Trying to predict it is like driving a car on a winding road, with the headlights off and looking in the rearview mirror. The best way to predict the future is for us to create it.”
We don't need to wait for the confinement to end.
(This article is a translation of the Portuguese original published in “Pessoas by ECO” on April 11. https://eco.sapo.pt/opiniao/o-day-after/)
#pandemic #coronavirus #covid19 #future #remotework #telecommuting #planning #discrimination #gender #ageism #generations #humanresources #peoplemanagement