Corona Changes: My Conversion to Working from Home

I am not going to address the big changes. Maybe we will all be nicer to each other post-lockdown, properly value our ‘low-skilled workers’, invest more in our health service and appreciate the inescapability of global threats so as to urgently address the climate crisis. And maybe we won’t. I am not hopeful.

But one episode from my life may be relevant to a post-Corona trend.

That personal experience

More than thirty years ago, I fell off my bike and broke my left arm. It was a serious break with bone poking through skin and required the fitting of two plates in my arm and a four-day stay in hospital. At that time I was commuting into London from Wiltshire, spending four hours a day travelling (on a good day). As a result of the injury, I was advised not to travel for a number of weeks even when I had largely recovered. I worked in legal publishing and, although I had some supervisory duties at that time, most of my work was desk-based, head-down writing and editing.

It was soon established that I could do at least some of this from home. I think I worked quite effectively that way. After six weeks, I returned to my commute and was quite pleased to escape the confines of home-working and looked forward to the social element of working. Three months later, I resigned and started to work as a freelance writer and editor.

There were other factors but the trek to work, the imposed rules and the cost of travel had all been put into a different perspective by the six-week break. I realised that they were not a fundamental part of life and work but a choice that, I hoped, I no longer had to make.

The lesson

Because of the Corona lockdown, it looks like many people, literally millions, will be working from home and escaping that commute and some of those work-based limitations for far longer than six weeks. Thirty years on, the technology that facilitates working from home has greatly improved; I had to rely on a friend’s fax machine and an Amstrad. Now we have Zoom and the like and other forms of online collaboration tools of a kind which I could never have envisaged.

A very large percentage of those millions working from home are going to stop and re-evaluate. It will not always be immediate. Many will rush back to human contact and only then start to consider what possible point there is in spending all that time and money on travelling to somewhere they don’t want to be.

The working from home sector is already significant. I don’t think it is going to expand; I think it is going to explode.

I hope employers are ready for some fundamental changes.