One frequently hears these days that a “new normal” has been created by the Covid-19 pandemic; that “nothing will be the same” afterwards. That is not to deny either a “temporary” change in behavior nor a step change in many aspects of life and business, where it comes to underlying trends.
We incontestably are behaving in different ways, partly the result of government mandates which are expected to be temporary. What happens after the pandemic is the issue. We should certainly expect a reversion to mean. Whatever trends were in place before the pandemic will reassert themselves, albeit from a higher level in many cases.
But that might not mean the rate of change changes very much. In fact, one might argue we already have seen this. This is a graph of Google searches for “5G.” Note the spike. That happened in March 2020 as many U.S. locations went into work-from-home and stay-home-from-school rules.
We have to guess at why the surge in searches happened, then so quickly receded, but a reasonable guess is that people were looking for remote work support solutions. But the spike only lasted from the end of March to mid-April. Then interest backed off to levels higher than before, but on the prior trend line.
As hard as it might be to envision, that is likely to happen with many business, economic and personal trends, post-pandemic, and after a few years. Consider “remote work.”
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, statistics on remote work are impressive enough to convince many observers that a fundamental and permanent shift has been made. We will know in five years whether that is an accurate assessment, but we also have to remember that “remote work” includes many disparate activities, many of which do not substantially affect the amount of time people actually spend at work places.
Work from home statistics often include actions such as “taking home some work from the office” (ranging from reading documents to correspondence management), working while traveling on business, unscheduled and episodic work from home, routine and planned work from home as well as permanent, full-time remote office or at-home workspaces.
Long-term trends in office space requirements, for example, typically depend on the amount of full-time, permanent basing at home locations, as well as permanent work-at-home for days per week or month.
One issue is how many jobs theoretically could be done entirely from home. “We estimate that 56 percent of the U.S. workforce holds a job that is compatible (at least partially) with remote work,” say researchers at Global Workplace Analytics. That noted, pre-Covid-19, “only 3.6 percent of the employee workforce works at home half-time or more, the firm notes.
Using every definition of work from home, including casual “take work home with you,” Gallup data from 2016 shows that 43 percent of the workforce works at home at least some of the time. So much hinges on the shift of the workforce to work from home at least 50 percent of the time.
source: Global Workplace Analytics
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