No one is making fun of the coronavirus, joking about mandatory self-isolation, about working from home or about restrictions on the movement anymore. People aren’t starting the day with funny messages or Facebook memes. It’s been only a few weeks so far and those newly formed conditions are no longer a temporary state; on the contrary, they have become a reality, which is being hard to accept. This new world is a big challenge for everyone.
The turning point came, undoubtedly, with shutting schools and shopping centres, introducing restrictions on public transport and a radical change in the organisation of companies. Everybody was in shock and would try to overcome it either with jokes and memes, with a sudden urge to catch up on film series or household chores. But soon it turned out that the lockdown would last longer than a week or two. And that all of us would need to change our lives.
The biggest novelty has been observed in the actual scope of a workplace. Some workers who can’t work from home because of their job responsibilities (for example, they are needed elsewhere, sometimes even far away from their place of living) continue working in their office, whereas others can work from home. At Balma we have been testing various work models, including working in the office and working from home, to determine how our employees should function now. From our experience we can tell that the conclusions aren’t straightforward and there are many aspects to consider related to which working mode to choose.
It seems that those who work remotely are in a more favourable situation since they can work in a warm and safe house, sit at their own desk, every day they put on the same comfortable house clothes and don’t waste time commuting to work. However, it is them who suffer a serious psychological disintegration caused by being deprived of the ritual of going out to work and having a difficulty separating work issues from home matters. In this new scenario they are at work all the time actually, and if they also happen to be parents raising infants or school-age children they find working extremely difficult as they must also keep their kids entertained and busy, and help them with remote learning, too. Developing new habits and routines as well as incorporating self-discipline in these difficult times can be quite a challenge.
There are in fact quite many jobs that can’t be done remotely. These include the jobs of: shop assistants in grocery stores, municipal services workers, transport workers, factory workers, maintenance workers, couriers, doctors, the ambulance service, the police, the fire brigade, and the army. These people aren’t closed within four walls, but at the same time are much more exposed to the virus. And they may think that this is some kind of social injustice (”Why are others allowed to be working from home whereas I am not?”) and may feel confused having no professional balance or routines. What’s more, meeting sanitary regulations at work makes contacting others more difficult and can also cause some tensions.
In our company, which has been creating products for office areas, designing them and which for many years has been continually observing trends in office design, we are confident that a great multidimensional change is coming. New criteria and requirements concerning office design will have to come into being; even though we are positive that offices as such shall remain we believe that the way of arranging office spaces and functioning in them could change. We shall see in the future what size of a change we’re talking about.