Just when the 21st century had gone past the teens and progressed into its twenties; the Covid-19 monster appeared to halt the era’s leap forward. With so many of us confined to our homes, we have certainly slowed down. Work-from-home after Covid-19 is emerging as a viable model.
The pandemic is unthinkably big, mostly because it has engulfed almost all the countries in a very short span of time and is super contagious, even though the mortality rate is not too high. It has the potential to threaten a significant part of the global population, if not checked in time.
Covid-19 has also delivered a blow that even multiple economic slowdowns and recessions—and two world wars—could not deliver in over a hundred years.
However, even more importantly, the pandemic has singularly exposed the hollowness, triviality, and unsustainability of the dominant socioeconomic models like never before.
It has also highlighted that we haven’t made serious attempts to leverage technology for accelerating the realization of the planet’s greater goals such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The sheer fact that a large part of the workforce is successfully working from home and a significant number of meetings and conferences are being replicated online is a testimony to the potential of the technology that we conveniently choose to ignore so far. This clearly shows that a sizable chunk of the travel that we make—as individuals, organizations, or even governments—are, at best, redundant. It also demonstrates that the CIOs, CISOs, and their teams have been able to scale up their organizations to meet work-from-home demands of hundreds or even thousands of workers on the fly.
In undertaking those travels, we are not just increasing our carbon footprints on the planet but are also being counterproductive.
The pandemic is giving reason for us—individuals as well as organizations—to pause and rethink our existing work and workplace models.
It would be worth continuing with the model that has come into being almost overnight, at least in part. A model of mass work-from-home after Covid-19 looks all set to stay.
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