COVID-19 has created a global ‘Working From Home’ Experiment
Key points:
- We are currently in the midst of the world’s biggest ‘working from home’ experiment with hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people working remotely.
- The share of the labour force that works from home in the US tripled in the past 15 years, according to the Federal Reserve.
- This increase is due to two factors; high living costs in metros, and collaborative technology, such as Microsoft Teams.
- This experiment allows for companies to build out their technology stack and create a ‘virtual’ culture that will progress the way business operates and make remote work an accessible option for future employees.
We have entered into an unprecedented time, where businesses have scrambled to encourage their people to work remotely, using technology to enable this relatively seamlessly. Now there is talk this will speed up the evolution of how businesses operate and interact in future, and we should expect anything but business as usual on the other side, but in the process are we making compromises?
In the communications industry, people are critical to our business. We are not a product business per se, we rely on people to generate opportunities, ideate and create solutions.
More specifically as a creative consultancy, our people rely on daily inspiration that is drawn from social interaction and their unique observations of society. A culture of creativity is born from this, in what researchers from Harvard call the ‘water cooler effect’ – where ordinary office conversations can produce some of the most innovative ideas.
If you speak to any successful entrepreneur, they will agree. They will tell you that new business ideas come about by breaking out of habitual routines and putting yourself in different situations. This same theory applies to our business, exploring the unordinary is exactly how brilliant ideas are conceived.
It poses a question, are we going to come out the other end of this ‘WFH revolution’ with less innovation, creativity and ideas?
We only have to look at IBM, who in 2017 shifted from 40% of their global employees working remotely to an in-office culture. Why? The need to build a culture of creativity and innovation was too strong that it trumped the productivity gain from distributed working.
Culture plays a critical role in our industry, it serves to provide distinction from one business to another, defines what talent you can attract and retain, and plays a big role when it comes to embracing creativity or entrepreneurialism. A culture of creativity and innovation is very hard to create virtually.
Our industry will evolve through this experience and finally prove the archaic ways of ‘9-5 in-office’ culture wrong, but I don’t agree that we can substitute physical interaction 100% of the time. For this reason, I see a need for people to keep alive the creative ecosystems that we have built within agencies and consultancies. It is this culture that is our point of difference.