Work from home and help to save the world — and yourselves

As the number of cases of COVID-19 increases exponentially around the world, it might seem insensitive to talk about the possible upsides of the virus, but upsides there most assuredly are. One of the biggest social changes taking place as individuals follow the advice of their governments to self-isolate and stay away from the office is the unprecedented uptake of homeworking, the advantages of which are becoming more obvious every day.

We can only hope that, when the threat of COVID-19 fades, companies around the world will have fundamentally changed the way they work, to the benefit of their staff, their bottom lines — and the environment.

Startling satellite images have emerged showing significant improvements in air quality over countries that have imposed strict quarantine measures — such as China and Italy — and thereby slashed the use of cars and other polluting vehicles.

The sudden fall in air travel is disastrous for many airlines but is certain to contribute to the fight against global warming.

Despite the closure of borders and the cancelation of flights, conferences and other events around the world international working relationships are still somehow managing to function.

Perhaps many will come to realize that sending staff off to expensive, time-consuming international conferences is not only bad for the environment, but is often little more than an excuse for a pointless junket in some far-flung exotic destination.

Many executives and politicians prize faceto-face contact and handshakes, persuading themselves that only by looking their opposite number in the eye can they truly judge them. However, business will continue to be done without the personal touch, which is clearly best avoided for now and, in the long run, may seem far less important.

The tools to support homeworking have been around for years and are excellent.

With platforms such as Skype or Zoom, conferences or one-to-one meetings can be conducted easily and effectively from virtually anywhere.

Documents and more can be easily shared via Google Docs and other applications, and multi-user project collaboration is easy with the likes of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite.

Many studies have shown that homeworkers generally perform better than their officebound colleagues.

The problem has been that many companies are reluctant to trust their staff to behave like grown-ups and remain stuck in a nine-to-five work model rooted in the previous century. This makes no sense from all kinds of perspectives, not least the cost to companies of renting or buying vast amounts of office space just so that managers can count the number of jackets on the backs of chairs.

As a freelance journalist I have been a home worker for years, with social contact during my working day limited to the occasional visit from the postman or an Amazon delivery driver and interviews conducted with subjects all over the world via Skype, Zoom, WhatsApp or the good old-fashioned telephone.

Guessing that each tele-conference-goer normally spends at least 30 minutes traveling about 25 km to and from work each day by car, I figure that working from home has saved them a total of 50 hours of pointless, unproductive travel in just a single week.

Clearly, gaining those hours — equivalent to a 10 percent boost in workforce — would be a tremendous advantage to an employer.

For an employee, the time not spent traveling could be spent on improving that all-important work-life balance. I know many parents who travel to work by train or car every day. They leave early and get home late and see their children only at the weekend. And then there’s the impact on the environment. Using standard international emission tables, I calculated that by not driving to and from work, 10 people alone would be saving more than 4,000 kg of carbon dioxide a year. To put this in perspective, a flight from Dubai to New York produces about 1,700 kg of carbon dioxide per passenger, while each person in the UAE accounts for the production of about 23,000 kg every year.

No one is in any doubt that COVID-19 is one of the most serious threats to human life the world has seen for a long time. But what is also certain is that this too will pass.

When it has, for our own sake and for the sake of the planet, let us hope that we will retain the invaluable lessons it has taught us about the way we live our lives.