Coronavirus: taking the long view

Working from home is a bit like getting access to a smartphone for the first time. You’re seduced by the convenience. Picture: istock

The coronavirus has forced changes in social behaviour. We wear masks, we practise social distancing, we work from home. Weddings, funerals, even the simple act of sitting by the bedside of the frail, the sick and the dying have had to be reimagined or forgone. Many of these social behaviours will be happily discarded in the recovery process. But I wonder whether other behaviours might linger to shape the way we live, work and play in the future.

Many people who worked from home during the pandemic will happily return to the workplace but some will choose to remain home-based. For 25 years the proportion of Australians engaging in paid work from home has remained at 4-5 per cent; if this proportion were to lift to, say, 10-15 per cent in the post-pandemic world, as I think it will, then a profound social shift is sure to ensue. Every five percentage-point uplift takes 600,000 workers out of the daily commute.

What will be the consequences? Breakfast will be a more leisurely experience because there’s no need to rush out the door. A range of comfort (and reward) foods will invade the lunch break since this meal is now eaten in indulgent isolation: bad news for celery sticks, good news for chocolate bars.

The demand for corporate attire will diminish and morph into demand for “business casual” or even “business activewear” designed to present well on camera: tightish top, dark (slimming) colours, V-neck to focus attention on the face. It looks odd to front a Zoom call from your home dressed in a suit and tie, so I predict a post-pandemic surge in demand for pocket squares. In fact, how about business activewear with provision for a pocket square? Why not? Pocket squares are marvellously versatile. A casual meeting calls for a pocket-square flourish whereas a formal meeting forces the pocket square to go rigid, angular and I-mean-business geometric.

The upside of working from home is that there is no commute. The downside is that there is no separation between work and home. This has its roots in the advent of the smartphone more than a decade ago. Now that every worker, indeed pretty well every adult, is connected to the internet at all times, the expectation is that work-related emails will be attended to immediately.

Working from home is a bit like getting access to a smartphone for the first time. You’re seduced by the convenience. But eventually you realise it can be controlling, demanding, punishing. I sent you an email, I expect an answer. In the pre-smartphone and work-from-home world, work issues had to fit around a weekly schedule.

Now, and I suspect going forward, the rules of engagement and regular working days and hours will be cast aside as people may not have to commute, or wear a suit, or eat celery sticks to appease the food monitors in the communal kitchen – but they will remain very much on-call at all times. The hard edge between work and home, between work time and home time, has been forever blurred.

And then there’s the matter of cyber security. If I log on to my work email using my home wi-fi, is there scope for cross- contamination and data breaches? It will take one landmark case to awaken workplaces to the challenges of working in non-controlled digital environments.

In the meantime, enjoy the non-commute, the comfort foods, the dressing down, and look for the imminent rise of the flamboyant and the geometric pocket square. Then you will know that my predictions about post-pandemic social behaviour are coming true.