Last week, the UK Government made a statement saying “If it is possible for people to work from home, then we would encourage them to do so”. Additionally, employer predictions and forecasts made by CIPD Research showed that almost 40% of employees will be working from home regularly once the crisis is over. Jes Staley, head of Barclays, who have 70,000 staff working from home, said that offices “may be a thing of the past”. However, with 30% of the UK workforce currently working from home, this may not be the utopia which many hope it will be.
It is important to consider the impact the Government’s work from home message has in the future on the mental health of those in the UK; with studies suggesting that in the early stages of lockdown 57% of those involved had symptoms of anxiety, and 64% of participants experienced common signs of depression.
Working from home could undermine the value of cooperation between human beings, which underpins society. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, said, in an episode of his podcast,- “we need a web which facilitates constructive and honest debate…it means developing better applications and platforms that empower human beings and reimagine distributed creativity, distributed collaboration, distributed compassion.”, emphasising that we do not have the technology to facilitate the conversations which enable cooperation.
In an ideal world, post Covid-19, working from home would allow us flexibility, enable companies to save money on transport and be a key chapter in how technology changed the way we lived before the crisis. However, until we have applications which facilitate the complexity of our face-to-face conversations, there is concern that there will be a divide in the quality of communication and teamwork pre vs post pandemic which may increase the sense of isolation and thus worsen mental health.
Written by Abby Hunt
Artwork by Aurora Brooks
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