Remember when Monday mornings
were like this?
They're a bit different now.
While those of us lucky to be working
are now doing so from a spare bedroom
or a kitchen table, the Coronavirus has forced
a sudden and mostly successful pivot
to working away from the office.
While the circumstances are unwelcome,
there are some benefits to this style of working.
You have a more content workforce,
a more motivated workforce,
and also a more productive and efficient workforce as well.
So when the Coronavirus is behind us,
will our workday ever be the same again?
We spend a lot of our time traveling to work
and for most, the commute is getting longer
all over the world.
Globally, two fifths of professionals consider
the commute to be the worst part of their day.
Commuting has been found to be a major cause
for stress that impacts on our physiological health
and as well, wellbeing.
The total working day gets longer,
you get less time at home,
you do less exercises when you have long commutes,
you also cook less healthy food.
I followed Swedish couples over a 10-year period
and we found that commuting long distances to work
over one hour increases the risk of separation.
Overall we find that it's a 40% increase
of risk of separating.
Before the pandemic, approximately 25 million
U.S. workers spent more than 90 minutes
getting to and from their jobs every day.
In South Korea, one in four workers
has a journey that long.
One of those people is Park Jong Han,
a manager at a major telecoms company.
Basically, I throw away three hours of my daytime
just to get to work and to come back home.
Since February, SK Telecom
has instructed its employees, including Jong Han,
to work from home, or if suitable,
to work from smaller, local offices
in the surrounding neighborhoods of Seoul.
One of the mobile offices, if I walk,
it takes about 15 minutes.
I truly appreciate the time,
and it actually comes back to motivation to work harder.
It's not just time, it's very quality time that I spend
instead of you know, getting stuck in a bus,
stuck in traffic somewhere, you cannot compare.
The amount of time that I spent with my family
really increased, you know?
During lunchtime, I can have lunchtime with my son.
Have you just shortened your hours
and you're able to go and, like you said,
exercise more or do you find yourself
working more as a result?
Because it's been too long, I totally forgot about it,
but in the very beginning when this program started,
I was exhausted actually, during the first few days
because there's no place for rest, right?
Because I need to work anywhere,
wherever I go, my mind was always on work
and when I talked to the teammates,
they actually felt the same, in the beginning.
But after a few weeks, I think everyone found
their own way to work
and now I know how to adjust, you know,
myself into, you know, work mode versus rest mode and so on.
So losing that journey into work
could be good for us.
But research claims our commute can also provide us
with a means to separate our personal
and professional lives
And in a world of 10-second
bed-to-laptop commutes,
that's a chance for some me time.
But while journey times were already generally on the up,
more of us were actually starting to commute less
thanks to a relatively new trend:
Flexible working.
Increasingly we have seen people remote working
from lots of different locations.
There has been a reluctance to encourage flexible working,
perhaps because managers see it as a loss of control,
it can be quite difficult to manage people
who you don't necessarily see on a day to day basis,
there might be concerns around efficiency
or productivity.
And is that a bit of a myth,
or is any of that born out in fact?
What we found is that productivity
can actually improve as a result of flexible working
and there isn't necessarily any impact
upon the business, if it's managed effectively.
There's quite a lot of benefits.
There is an opportunity for workers
to have more autonomy over their scheduling,
over when they work and where they work
and when people have that degree of autonomy,
it does lead to a workforce that is happier.
You may have flexibility over the time
that you have to go into work or the time
that you can come home so that you're able to avoid
rush hour traffic and if you're working from home
a few days a week or completely at home,
then obviously you can avoid the commuting altogether
and there's also benefits for employers.
A study by Harvard and New York University
found that for those working from home,
the workday is 48 minutes longer,
probably replacing that time you spent commuting.
There's significant benefits for organizations
that are able to manage these kind of processes effectively.
So what actions can organizations implement
to harness the power of flexible working?
They need to have very clear processes and procedures
around operating flexible work
so that everybody has the same expectations.
One department allows the majority of their employees
to work flexibly and another department
which is led by another line manager
who has a different view, then you might find
that flexible working isn't as supported as much.
You need to treat people consistently
and in a fair way but you also need to recognize
that there can be individual differences
in how people adapt to flexible working.
It will suit some people but not others,
so you do need to have a degree of flexibility
yourself as a manager in how you manage teams
and how you manage people.
And this flexibility can lead to productivity.
A two-year Stanford study of 1,000 employees
at one company found that working
from a home office resulted in
a 13% increase in productivity
and 50% of them were less likely to quit.
Despite this, half of them still wanted to go back
to the office nine months later,
even though their average commute was 40 minutes each way.
Another survey conducted by Bain and Company
on its own employees, found that productivity increased
for some thanks to no commute and an ability
to focus better at home, but also decreased for others
due to a lack of work mindset
and a dedicated workspace.
So perhaps we'll start to see a more hybrid style
become the norm, where for some days we work from home
for specific solo tasks
and others we travel to the office
to meet and collaborate with the team.
The changing nature of our working lives
has already led to many white-collar workers
leaving the city or moving further out,
to find more space, some greenery,
or to escape the urban beeps and bustle.
One person who misses the commute is Alice Shay,
an urban planner and designer.
I miss riding the subway.
Riding the subway is one of those incredible experiences
in New York City, it's got its highs
and it's got its lows, but honestly,
the subway system in New York City
is one of the greatest levers for equity that we have.
It is one price to get all the way across the city.
Many of us are now working from home, you know,
or at least for a couple of days of the week.
Will where we live drastically change, do you think?
We're in a moment where commutes can be zero,
so what does that mean for how we are distributed
across our settlements and urban agglomerations?
I think it provides a lot of flexibility
for certain workers, it's true,
but there's other ties that keep people to place,
right, it's not just about commute,
so that's one factor amongst many.
Access to services, access to family,
access to the culture that keeps the city alive
or your lifestyle interesting.
So the city as we know it isn't exactly going anywhere,
but it might change in the way that we use it
and the way it works?
Our street infrastructure and streetscapes
can be reconfigured in a time of social distancing
when we're understanding that private cars
may not be as essential as we thought they were.
We posited that if you took the streetscape in Manhattan,
which is equivalent to four times the size of Central Park,
reconfigured it in a way that actually looked
at streetscapes as being about space for mobility
and distribution at a bigger scale,
so how do we actually decrease the number of cars
and what are the opportunities that come with that?
So increased space for pedestrians and walking,
more effective distribution systems,
buses could run at least twice as fast
getting people around the city in an equitable way.
The transformation of the way that we use our streetscapes
could also enable better delivery of urban systems.
Is there an opportunity to build more equality in cities,
you know, key workers for instance
who aren't doing jobs on a laptop right now,
they have to be in those areas, don't they,
you know, no matter what?
I mean you bring up a great point.
Service workers, essential workers,
they are geographically bound.
Mobile healthcare could be distributed more widely,
more equitably, particularly if there's government
and public drivers behind the way that that is distributed.
We're also seeing massive changes in the way
that retail is happening, right?
Many, many shops are closed.
When we have times when cities are more porous,
when there's flux, when you know,
the real estate sector isn't so saturated,
that porousness allows for an opportunity
for microentrepreneurship and also new innovations
at a kind of small scale.
You know, small businesses that are starting up,
food trucks that are gonna be distributing food
across the city, different types of services
that operate in different types of places.
Our changing relationship with work
could affect where we live, too.
It could accelerate a move to what's known
in urban planning theory as the polycentric city.
Polycentric city would be a place
where you can work, you can live,
you can recreate, you can have your social life,
your family in a more local and distributed way.
In cities like Paris,
it's known as the 15-minute city,
where daily necessities are within a 15-minute reach
on foot or by bike.
You reduce transit times, you reduce GHG emissions
and also you provide more equitable,
more sustainable access to services
by this more distributed city model,
but that's not to say that you need
to live in the suburbs, right?
So what's to say the office
can't come closer to us?
I think going forward, companies will need
to support workers in that externality
and it could take many forms.
Does everyone wanna work from home?
No, some people like going to a place,
commuting, how are companies that usually would say
come to our main office, oh now actually
we have a set of sponsored co-working spaces
across the city that are closer to where you live
and can decrease your commute and maybe you go
to those spaces three days a week
and you come into the office two.
I think we're gonna see a whole range
of new types of work as people have gained confidence
in the efficiency of work from home during this time.
Since the virus outbreak,
serviced office brand Regus has already seen
a surge of more than 40% in activity
in New York City commuter hub southern Connecticut.
In the U.K., house builders are seeing developments
outside of London driven by a change
in home office working.
While experiences and jobs vary all over the world,
many workers have come to expect change.
More than 90% of people in a recent survey
said they wouldn't return to the office
full time after COVID.
There's reasons for employers to embrace the change too.
Some already are.
Twitter and Facebook have said the switch
could become permanent for large parts of their workforce.
The COVID-19 pandemic has sent shock waves
through the world of work.
Having an on-off relationship with the office
could make us happier and more productive,
while also helping the environment
and making our cities more livable.