Adapting to life after coronavirus

In just a few weeks, much of so­ci­ety has had to adopt liv­ing and work­ing habits that it has re­sisted for decades. Today, a large num­ber of fam­i­lies and friends in­ter­act only by video calls, and a good pro­por­tion of peo­ple are work­ing from home, doing tele­work­ing. The tech­nol­ogy that en­ables these pos­si­bil­i­ties is not new, it has been around for a while, but only a small part of so­ci­ety has adapted to it so far.

It is very likely that life after the Covid-19 cri­sis will in­volve both home­work­ing and video con­fer­enc­ing as gen­er­ally ac­cepted rou­tines, and this will also in­crease on­line shop­ping, ed­u­ca­tion, cul­tural con­sump­tion and med­i­cine.

But it’s clear that home­work­ing isn’t just about doing a job from home; this is as wrong as when it was be­lieved that the e-book was the pages of a printed book con­verted into a PDF for­mat. Home­work­ing re­quires new rou­tines, a dif­fer­ent re­la­tion­ship with the com­pany and the cus­tomer, and new processes. It is a cul­tural change that has eco­nomic im­pli­ca­tions, and es­pe­cially en­vi­ron­men­tal ones.

The post-Covid-19 cri­sis econ­omy will nec­es­sar­ily have to be very en­vi­ron­ment and peo­ple friendly. That means that com­pa­nies that focus on home­work­ing should not lose sight of the fact that the goal is not cost re­duc­tion but ef­fi­ciency and re­spect for both the em­ploy­ees and the en­vi­ron­ment. Work­ing from home is a great op­por­tu­nity to re­duce the eco­log­i­cal dam­age caused by mil­lions of peo­ple com­mut­ing every day, but it also has huge risks: the dan­gers of be­com­ing a slave to work or an in­crease in job in­se­cu­rity are high. There are al­ways pros and cons, but the in­dis­putable re­al­ity is that for mil­lions of us who are con­fined to our homes, the vir­tual of­fice is now the new norm: work re­la­tion­ships have en­tered a new era, and the dis­rup­tion has not been caused so much by the tech­nol­ogy – which al­ready ex­isted – but by a highly con­ta­gious virus. All this will surely have far-reach­ing con­se­quences, and we hope that read­ers will find our fea­ture on tele­work­ing use­ful and in­ter­est­ing (pages 18-21).

Stay safe and keep in touch, and don’t for­get to share with us your ex­pe­ri­ence of the lock­down and how it has changed your life!