It is hard to assess the legal impact of the shift to hybrid work. Employment law, after all, is largely based on the assumption that work takes place at an office or a factory. Just as the rise of the gig economy makes it harder to say who is an employee and who is self-employed, so the rise of working from home tests the boundaries where employees’ and employers’ responsibilities begin and end. Yet the rise of hybrid work has other legal effects-the second consequence. The idea of managers using tools to talk to and monitor workers in their own homes may be disconcerting, but it is usually legal. Research by Mr Bloom, Mr Davis and Yulia Zhestkova finds a big rise in the share of new patent filings for work-from-home technologies. The pandemic has encouraged managers to place more trust in technology that lets workers communicate and collaborate effectively, even when out of the office. This can be done the old-school way: by picking up the phone. Instead they have to work to get the message across, argues Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic of Columbia University. Managers cannot just hope subordinates will pick up information by osmosis, as in an office. “Before the pandemic,” says Monica Kang, founder of InnovatorsBox, a workplace-culture firm, “we forgot that people are people first.” During it, the sight of children invading Zoom meetings or of people’s laundry in the background will have softened even hard-nosed managers, prompting them to pay more attention to their staff.Īnother is that remote work has forced people to communicate better. One reason is that blurring the line between work and home makes it harder for firms to treat office staff as automatons. “Covid-19 may be the best thing that ever happened to employee engagement”, argues Josh Bersin, an analyst.
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Another survey, by Quantum Workplace, a software firm, takes the views of thousands of people and finds that the share of “highly engaged” employees leapt during the pandemic. A poll by Gallup covering the early part of the pandemic finds that the share of American employees “engaged” at work reached its highest level since data began in 2000. There was a jump in approval when the pandemic broke out, with especially big increases in employees’ ratings for transparency and communication. In a report for the MIT Sloan Management Review, Don Sull of MIT and Charles Sull of CultureX, which advises firms, analysed workers’ ratings of the culture and values of their employers. Studies find no correlation between the supposed core values of companies and employees’ assessment of how they reflect them. Too often claims that businesses are committed to transparency, integrity and communication are boilerplate platitudes. And less positively, it will deepen political and cultural divisions between cosseted knowledge workers and the rest. It will lead to changes in employment law to offer better protection for workers who spend less time in the office. It will force managers to raise their game, improving office life for all. Yet the blurring of home and office will have huge consequences. Firms will not swap their full-time staff for freelancers, which might be tempting if the workforce were wholly remote. Firms will continue to “onboard” new staff in the old-fashioned way-they can do it in an office, rather than by video-link-while junior staff will still have an opportunity to skulk by the lifts in hopes of grabbing five minutes with the chief executive. “Remote-only” companies will remain a small minority. The shift to a hybrid world of work means that some fanciful predictions from early in the pandemic will not come to pass. Tracking data from Google suggest that attendance at South Korean workplaces has settled at a level marginally lower than it was before covid-19. Direct pre-pandemic comparisons do not exist, but there is little doubt that this represents a big increase.
Data for New Zealand show that, in the three months to December 2020, 27% of people in employment worked at home at some time during the week. In places that have conquered covid-19, working from home has stuck-though perhaps not as much as some people might have hoped. It also presents a huge opportunity for office-based workers. Employers are less keen, but their expectation that a fifth of working time will be spent at home (one day a week) is a big change from the previous norm. In one paper José Maria Barrero, Nick Bloom and Steven Davis, three economists, survey thousands of Americans and conclude that, after the pandemic, the average employee would like to work from home nearly half the time. A growing body of research points to what post-pandemic working patterns may look like.
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