Flexible work progress happened in mere months

The Australian, 5 December 2020

In a wildly unpredictable year, full of twists and turns of all sorts, there is broad consensus among executives about at least one thing. The pandemic meant years’ worth of progress in remote and flexible work happened in just a couple of months.

Working from home has had its ups and downs. Illustration: Vector
Working from home has had its ups and downs. Illustration: Vector

That’s a shift that will stick around long after a COVID vaccine has been deployed and the virus eradicated.

It’s easy to take for granted the degree to which technology kept many of us in jobs and able to work. If COVID-19 had hit in the 1990s, for example, or perhaps even the early 2000s, the technology to support working from home simply didn’t exist. Zoom calls are only possible thanks to broadband internet connections, and we now work with emails and Slack channels at unprecedented pace, sometimes to our own detriment. Imagine if we had to use our dial-up modem to connect to the internet, and then load web pages at a snail’s pace before we could start getting any work done? Or texting our colleagues using an old Nokia, rather than the efficient group chats we have today.

Thankfully, a lot of the infrastructure underpinning remote work already existed in 2020, we just were forced to use it and rely on it in a way we would never have predicted. That shift was already underway, it’s just happened far sooner than it was going to.

The Deal Magazine

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