In the future, many papers
will be written on how the covid-19 pandemic transformed the nature of work. As
millions of employees have relocated to living rooms and kitchen tables, many
are already foreseeing the death of the office, a new era of flexible
timetables and mass exoduses from cities. Meanwhile workers’ daily routines are different in many ways and do not add up to a golden age of
white-collar liberation.
Take modern office routine:
meetings, emails and time spent at work. According to a recent Harvard Business
School study covering more than 3m people in 16 cities in America, Europe and
the Middle East, employees have been attending more meetings—by video
conference, rather than in person—sending more emails and putting in more hours
since the widespread shift to home-working in March. They found that, compared
with pre-lockdown levels, the number of meetings an average worker attends is 13%
higher (see chart). The number of people in the average meeting has risen too,
by 13.5%, perhaps because video conferences, unlike office-bound ones, are not
constrained by space. One ray of hope is that meetings are shorter, by about
20%, or 12 minutes, on average. The trend is most marked in Brussels, Oslo and
Zurich.
Does the lack of a commute at
least mean workers have more time to themselves? Unfortunately, no, the
researchers find.
Across all 16 cities, on
average, people work an extra 48.5 minutes a day—more than the average
commuting time in America or Europe. The true figure for working hours may be
higher. NordVPN, a virtual-private-network provider, reckoned in April that
workdays are an average of three hours longer.
Did you finish reading this?
Good. Don’t you have a meeting to get to?
From The Economist (edited)
