Dr Rachel Morrison, an associate professor in the Centre for Occupational Health & Safety Research Well-being at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand gave her views on the matter.
Sputnik: How will the world of work change in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic?
Dr Rachel Morrison: I think that there are going to be three main ways in which the way we work is going to change, and the first is probably going to be the actual physical environment of work, so we might see wider corridors, we might see one-way foot traffic as they do in hospitals, and I suspect that things like activity-based work and hot-desking, where people are kind of moving through the day and sharing equipment, will become a thing of the past. We are more likely to have things like set desk arrangements, and less likely to have packed cubicles where people are sitting face to face.
I think that there is going to be a whole lot of behavioural change which we are really already seeing, and which we saw before countries started locking down, so things like hand washing, using a lot more cleaning equipment, cleaning keyboards, people are going to probably be expected to wear masks.
Even things like shaking hands and kissing on the cheek in the workplace are probably going to be discouraged while there is community transmission of these viruses, so I think that there are going to be quite impacted, even the little things like having family photos or mementoes on your desk, if they are not easily sanitised; they are going to become carriers of the virus as well.
Sputnik: Could working from home for extended periods be detrimental to the mental health of employees?
Dr Rachel Morrison: I think that working remotely is a bit of a double-edged sword; most research does suggest that if you are able to work remotely for part of the week, the outcome is really good both for the organisation and for things like work-life balance, productivity increases and wellbeing increases.
That said, working remotely all the time and having no contact with your colleagues is not great, so I think that there are a lot of people that really have quite high expectations from their work, for providing educational communication and friendships, and to remove that entirely is really difficult.
It really isn’t that easily replaced with things like Skype and Zoom, as all of a sudden you’ve got anxiety that your technology might not work, you have to work quite hard to listen for non-verbal cues, we don’t have a lot of the same sharing space and time, and it’s really different from doing it and talking through an electronic screen or over the phone.
Dr Rachel Morrison: Absolutely, and certainly in New Zealand, there have already been calls from some organisations to; instead of making people redundant, put them on an eighty percent salary on a four day week, to kind of make it more feasible to keep organisations going and viable in these really difficult Financial Times as well.
New Zealand has actually got quite a few organisations now that have received quite a bit of attention for putting in a four day week, where they didn’t reduce pay, and told people that if they got all their work done in the four days; then they didn’t need to work the fifth day, and they actually found that productivity improved quite a lot, and wellbeing also improved. I think people are able to be more productive in this setup if given the chance, yes.