The Exhausted Dog

Sir Isaac Newton was elected President of the Royal Society in 1703 and held that role until his death in 1727. Newton’s discoveries, and those of his contemporary ‘fellows’, had impacts on an astronomical scale that are now obvious. But these were dwarfed, from a UK perspective, when compared to the revolution unfolding in the fields of England during the latter part of the 18th century. The Enclosure Acts of the 16th to 18th centuries catalysed the transfer of ownership of the majority of grazing land out of public, common hands and into private possession. This ultimately was a key trigger for the industrial revolution, along with the seed drill, the cotton gin and the spinning jenny. It all matters because these were major factors in the movement of rural workers from their ‘cottage industry’ homes where they laboured to towns and cities. To urban centres and their factories where the new workforce would travel daily, work and return home each night. A transformation that took over a century and resulted in the majority having a place to toil away from home - and no longer ‘working from home’.

This same pattern of mass migration from the ‘countryside’ – as home and workplace - to the city, has been most striking in China and India over the past few decades. In China, under the Hukou system, this migration resulted in around 50% of the total workforce living and going to work in cities - most certainly not ‘working from home’. The mass migration of the industrial revolution took many decades while the changes in China and India have been far faster. But on a global scale we have continued with this major practice of leaving home to travel to our place of work. Until now!

On the 23rd March, Prime Minister Boris Johnson told us to stay at home for all but essential activities. And so, on the 24th March a new inverted mass migration from the place of work to working at home became the new norm. Following, the same pattern, across the world, from Shanghai to Rome to London to Boston. A reverse migration not over decades, but in days and weeks. This change was not caused by an economic upheaval or disruptive innovation, but by a single, invisible, fast-moving human enemy called COVID-19. A killer whose frontline advance takes advantage of our very humanity. It preys on those people who live together, work together, dine and drink together and kills those who are most vulnerable.

Now, more than two weeks after the new COVID-19 catalysed workers migration, back to homes as places of work, most have settled into new routines. We stand two metres apart in queues to go into shops. We clap and cheer on Thursday at 8pm. We take our daily ‘constitutional’ walk, or run, or cycle. For those lucky enough to have a dog, and a space to walk them, we take advantage of our canine companions’ daily unabated joy at another loop round the same block; even when, for family pets, this can happen several times a day as each member takes their turn to exercise. The working from home rituals, getting out of pyjamas and being careful to select a different tee-shirt from yesterday - for the unending video meetings, the short walk to the desk, a coffee break and dogwalk. But work gets done. Funny that?! Ground-hog day, “is today Wednesday?”. But for many, life is more complex. Those thousands moved into furlough, paid not to work, unsure of their future - and the self-employed and small business owners trying to figure out “what next?”.

Then there is the frontline. Every morning my neighbour, an infectious disease doctor, like thousands of other healthcare workers, must travel to work to spend long days looking into the eyes of desperate and sometimes dying patients. She is staring into the face of COVID-19. There are the shelf stackers, the teams of people on tills, the delivery drivers, binmen, police, firemen, and care workers. All on the frontline, not knowing for sure whether that last conversation, the last interaction might be the one that caused them to catch this Corona virus. Thanks to you all. Like the hundreds of thousands of volunteers that have stepped forwards we all can also support the frontline – simply by staying at home, to work, rest and watch the Spring emerge through our, now open, windows.

In a week in which the Prime Minister has succumbed to the onslaught of work and virus combined, his public service along with that of all front line workers is a shining example that contrasts starkly with the attitude of the Professional Football Players Association. Their attitude to the COVID-19 crisis is to say the tax on our earnings should be enough, because we earn so much, and the rest of us must all feel like the starving revolutionaries of France when they were advised “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”. In this same week, speaking to colleagues in Tokyo, Boston and San Francisco, our shared experiences are working from home and sensing new things around us. Birdsong, the cleaner air and benefits of a short commute to the kitchen office. Perhaps we should take some of these positives from this modern disease of COVID-19. We should be motivated to move to less poisonous forms of transport, wave goodbye to the internal combustion engine, take fewer journeys on less noisy and less polluting airplanes. Understand and gain from our working from home experiences, and for those who can, spend more working time at home, less on the commute and enjoy the productivity gains that will burgeon from this.

Like our working forebears, our migration away from the cities and their factories, our quieter streets, our cleaner air and new world of work, requires innovation in engineering and technology, behavioural science, management and leadership. Nothing should stop us, so that generations of workers to come will look back at this time of COVID-19 with admiration at our attributes of “self-discipline, of quiet good-humoured resolve and of fellow-feeling”. We will look back in amazement at the innovation that COVID-19 catalysed in ways no less impactful than those in the time of Newton.