The conundrums of post-COVID work schedules

Yesterday I wrote that it’s likely the COVID-19 pandemic will be more or less forgotten fairly quickly, like it’s Spanish flu predecessor and various other pandemics in the modern world. On the other hand, even if that happens, it is true that the cultural and economic ripple effects of the pandemic are likely to continue to be significant in a number of ways.

For example, I find that my little corner of the work world — academia — is rife with this:

[A] lot of people who have returned to their offices for some or all of the week have found that they’re the only ones there, or others are staying isolated in their offices, and all communication still happens over email, Slack, or Zoom. As a result, they’re spending time commuting to and from the office and dealing with all the hassles of in-person work but without any of the promised payoff.

One thing the pandemic has made clear is that, among professional knowledge class workers, enormous amounts of work that was being done on-site could be done just as or even more effectively from home. It’s also true, however, that this varies at the structural level — I very much doubt for example that teaching as a whole can be done as effectively remotely as in person. This becomes truer as the students are younger and classes are smaller: remote kindergarten is obviously a bad joke, while a 300-person Intro Psych undergrad class might not be, etc.

It also varies, of course, at the individual level: Some people are going to be a lot better at remote work of all types than other people, because of personality differences, technological competence, and so forth.

(There’s also a massive gender component to all this, as the the problematic trending toward ludicrous idea that one can work effectively from home while having primary childcare responsibilities for small children often gets ignored in these discussions.)

Hybrid work schedules are a way of dealing with this dilemma, but as the quote above illustrates they’re prone to a worst of both worlds scenario, where you get all the disadvantages of traditional in-person work with little or none of the advantages, because everybody has gotten used to working remotely, including working quasi-remotely while physically present in the same space. (It’s always worth mentioning in this context that there are enormous amounts of work in our society that still has to be done in person, and that these discussions tend to be slanted toward the perspective of the professional knowledge class types who naturally dominate media discourse on social issues).

In any event, a silver lining of the COVID pandemic has been the breaking down of many traditional barriers to working from home. But negotiating the brave new world of work that this on the whole positive development has created is going to be a long and difficult process, as we transition from the old work culture to the new one(s).