If an apparent global trend of workers re-prioritizing work and life balance holds over the long term, there could be huge ramifications for office employee work life virtually globally. A Microsoft survey of 31,000 people globally shows that huge percentages of office workers report reassessing the value of work, compared to “life” activities. Put simply, health and well-being are more important than “work.”
In some ways, that might always have been true: the adage that “your job is not worth dying for” applies. Faced with a widespread pandemic that did raise the odds of “death,” most people were enticed to make a new assessment of health risk and “going to work,” especially when governments and firms virtually forced them to stay away.
It likely remains too early to see which changes of attitude or work practices will remain, and which will fade. “Hybrtd” work patterns blending in-office with remote venues probably will be more common. It is possible that fully-remote work will increase. Those are obvious possible outcomes.
What is less easy to predict are other changes, including the value and skills required of managers of often-remote workforces. That has gotten to be a bigger challenge for some decades as knowledge work has grown more common.
And there is at least some evidence that there already exists a mismatch between manager thinking and knowledge worker thinking about what drives higher productivity. Covid has arguably had little to do with the divergence in thought.
What might be fair to say is that, at least for the moment, knowledge workers have taken a hard look at their own priorities, leading to what many call the” “great resignation" of people during the Covid pandemic.
All that means there is a chance for changing practices in many areas of knowledge work, and at least some possibility of beneficial changes.
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