The thing is ...
Why do we have to make it complicated?
Wait, it says my mic is muted.
Oh, I just left it!
Hello.
Hi,yeah I can hear you, that Micah. Is that Micah?
Yeah, it's Micah, yeah.
What's going on? I don't think I know who you are.
I'm so confused. It's Iman from the Guardian.
Yeah ...
Do I have the wrong Micah?
Yeah .. which Micah are you looking for?
Micah Alpern.
Oh, right, yeah, no that's not me.
I'm Micah ...
I'm so sorry, Micah Hauser ... I'm having a nightmare here.
Welcome to this week's episode of A New Normal.
We are back this week to talk about the future of work
There is a lot of uncertainty and a lot of fear that people have around their jobs.
So many people are still furloughed
and not sure what's going to happen after that scheme ends but elsewhere
there are questions to be asked about not just how we've had to change but how
we'd like to change in the future.
So I did a callout and I asked you, our viewers,
how your work has had to change,
what you would like to maintain about your life now
and what your hopes are regarding the future of work.
I totally agree.
'Don't try and take away my beard, you've taken away my office.'
'But you will not take away my beard!'
It's so British how many people have said if I could work from home I'd get a dog,
or if I could work from home I'd spend more time with my dog
and I'm like, that's great, I mean, silver linings.
After getting through all of the technical issues, I managed to get
through to Micah Alpern who works for Ernst & Young.
He works in an area looking at kind of culture
and the way HR works with employees and organisations and he is an ideas guy so
I wanted to ask him what he makes of what's going on at the moment.
Hello.
Hi Micah!
This series we've got called A New Normal,
was trying to project a little bit to the future.
Working from home as we're experiencing it,
isn't necessarily how working from home always works ...
If you think, you know, before Covid, right, when people said work from home,
they meant like, I might go sit in, you know, a coffee shop
or I might, you know, go sit outside and that's work from home and there's no kids around,
there's no other roommates around
and that's like the image we all have of work from home
before Covid and now, you know, work from home is not that, right?
There's kids around, there's your other roommates,
you know, everybody's on calls in different rooms ...
The question is how are we going to work with some people ...
Thank God this isn't like a live interview.
You know, we're thinking about the future work, you know, companies that we've
been talking to are really trying to figure out,
how are they going to work in this atmosphere where some people are still going to be
at home and some people are going to be the at office,
and those people might, you know,
go home, work from home, go back to the office and vice versa throughout the time.
So from the callout, we reached out to a few people so we could speak to them
about their specific situations.
I spoke to Brian from Scotland who before the lockdown was traveling internationally
every week and who in the last three to four months
hasn't been further than three miles away from his house.
Hi Brian!
You're hearing a bit of echo because ...
Would you be able to explain what your work was like before?
And how that has changed because of the restrictions that have come into place.
The clients that I work with are
everywhere from London, Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam ...
The nature of the job means that I have to be traveling extensively
regularly, I mean, I came back from Brussels on the 6th of March so that
wasn't too long before lockdown.
In terms of my actual work life, it's hardly been affected,
in fact, if anything, I'd say far more productive now.
I spend a lot of time now speaking to clients obviously using video conferencing ...
For working far more effectively, we've taken a lot of cost out of the business.
The wining and the dining, and the travel
and the lifestyle and all of that stuff, it seems to be something that
you're happy to do without.
Do you not kind of miss that a bit?
Listen, absolutely.
But we don't need to do it all the time and I think what it's making us do
it is making not just us or me, it's making the clients also question
is this absolutely necessary?
The people who seem to have like the most control in their personal lives are really enjoying this.
There is like a divide between people who have got kids and don't have kids
but there's also a divide generationally.
I really want to be like, you're not inadequate,
I don't know you but you're not inadequate.
This is difficult.
I mean, sometimes it's hard enough to get yourself out of bed
how do you get children out bed? Like ...
Can you imagine, if a child was like to me, 'what's the point?'
I'd be like, 'I don't know!?
I'm being honest, I'd be like, what is the point?
If i put my headphones on my daughter, she just pulls them out because she wants me
to listen to her so ... I can't create my own little bubble
in my head which is what I do at work.
I've spoke to Andrew who has been on furlough for most of the time
but last week went back to work about his situation and how it is working with his children at home.
And I also spoke to Rochelle who is from Australia and has a partner from South Africa and
together they've got a three-year-old who they have been looking after while
working continuously through the lockdown.
As much as possible, we do two and a half hour rotations,
two and a half hours with our son and then two and a half hours worth of work
and opposite shifts to each other from 8am to 6pm every day.
We also tried to work in at least an hour for each of us not to be doing one of those two things.
Do you feel like you've had priorities realigned when it comes to work and
family balance or are you just kind of thinking about
keeping a job?
To an extent I'm just kind of focused on keeping a job
because I know there's redundancies going on all over the place ...
If unemployment starts to last too long and I need to draw in pennies,
I'll start doing freelance work just to bring in the money
but I prefer not to.
I'd like having a division between home and work if you know what I mean.
A lot of people I've spoken to have said that they miss elements
of the office and the office environment. I completely respect that.
I think there is a lot of privilege that goes
around the idea that you can work from home.
I am lucky enough to have a work from home environment in which I can shut a door and have
a secluded space, you know, some people have a spare room,
some people have a bed in a shared room.
This isn't really being addressed so to address the disparity of what's
available in a home environment, I think is something we need to get to.
I think that's a really powerful and clear
explanation of how so many people but particularly so many
young people living in cities are kind of struggling with this.
Do you think that there are people that are struggling that
are not willing to tell their employers that they're struggling or not willing
to tell the people around them that they're struggling because there's that
thing of, like this person says here, like,
I feel like, you know, I've got everything I need
but i'm miserable.
I think managers are going to have to really lead and manage differently,
they need to be checking in with people more, see, you know, how they're doing,
making sure they're connected, asking them, you know, what can I do for you,
how can I help you, you know, with your motivation,
with your productivity ...
I kind of see that as like a really big part of what managing should have been anyway.
Agreed!
Yes, there's some challenges right now but hopefully we'll learn from this and
we'll be able to improve the experience that
employees have in our organisation and not just revert back and say,
OK, it's over, let's go back to being, you know,
micromanaging to being bureaucratic to not giving our people space
to, you know, think and innovate ...
So that's my hope.
This is an extremely difficult time and this episode has been kind of tricky to hit
I guess the right tone knowing what the context is outside
and how different everyone's experiences are at the moment
but i guess what this video is trying to do is look at
the fact that for those people who are still in work
or those people looking for work, we are readdressing what our priorities are
and what it is that we want to see in the future when it comes to
employment and what it is that we want to leave in the past.
The next episode we've got coming up is about travel
and the environment, following a little bit from what Brian was saying
and that will be coming out very soon so make sure that you do like, comment
and subscribe to stay up to date with everything that we're doing in this series.