Captain’s Blog – Back to Work?

Leaving aside for the moment fears of a second wave of the virus, thoughts and considerable media coverage are turning to when or perhaps if office based workers will return to work. The Government are guilty of sending out mixed messages here. Having told us all to stay at home during the early stage of the pandemic, some but not all Ministers are urging us to get back to our desks. The Civil Service and Local Authorities however don’t seem to be listening. Most Whitehall departments have only a handful of staff working from their offices whilst in Local Authority land things are even more stark. Tameside Council in Greater Manchester recently built a brand new HQ from which no-one is working. The situation is similar in many other towns and cities throughout the UK. The effect on service businesses has been well documented with Pret a Manger for example shedding thousands of staff and other businesses reliant on office worker traffic closing down altogether. That has a direct impact on the economy ‘guesstimated’ at £15 billion by one forecaster. There are however other less obvious impacts that need to be considered. Home working has been remarkably successful over the last 6 months and the ease and skill with which systems have been moved from office to home is genuinely surprising. Hats off to the IT people for making it happen and to the workers who adapted so quickly including those who had to acquire a new set of IT skills. 

The problem looming large however doesn’t involve those people, rather it affects the younger generation who are in the very early stages of their careers. Most didn’t need to acquire new IT skills but are still learning people skills. That is what they pick up in the office watching colleagues making good (and bad) decisions, watching and learning body language in meetings, seeing face to face how someone can change a negotiation through force of personality and generally seeing how humans interact with each other in real life. None of that works over Zoom or Teams where nuances and subtleties are often lost and attempts at humour to defuse or enhance a situation either aren’t attempted or where they, are can fail miserably. I cant’ think that many new businesses will be built remotely unless they are purely tech and that leaves a huge void. When the economic fallout from COVID is factored in, and none of us have seen how bad that will be, it’s clear that the younger generation of twenty somethings are going to bear the brunt. The irony that they are the group least affected physically by the virus isn’t lost on them. No wonder many of them are so bitter at the smug attitudes of some of the older generation who clearly love the idea of saving their two hour commute and the £30 a week spent on their coffee habit in favour of working in their slippers. However another peril awaits them too. Speaking to one major business owner it became clear that a home worker is viewed more as a resource and less as a person. If we go back to the principles of basic economics we learn about Land, Labour and Capital. ‘Labour – human effort used in production. Capital – tangible assets used to produce goods and services’. Once the home worker moves from labour to capital and becomes a resource like a computer or a robot then he becomes very interchangeable and we now know that with our excellent IT capability that resources could be located anywhere – India for example – where we might find that capital is every bit as good and significantly cheaper.