Greetings from The Future: Working From Home Edition

[msconduct]

New Zealand is currently pretty much alone in the world when it comes to Covid. All the countries that were keeping Covid to a minimum along with us, including Taiwan, Vietnam and Australia, have sadly seen big jumps in cases due to the Delta variant. Apart from some small islands, New Zealand is now the only place with no Covid in the community. We haven't had a community case since January of this year. In fact, after our very strict seven-week lockdown in mid-2020, most places in New Zealand haven't seen a single community case since.

All this could change at any moment, of course, if Delta or another variant manages to slip through our border defences. Meanwhile, however, we're living in the post-Covid future - so that means we might have some insight on what that might look like for everyone else too. And the question everyone wants to know the answer to is: will we be able to keep working from home after the pandemic?

And the answer?

YES!!!

Now before you open the champagne and rush out to stock up on pyjamas, I have to warn you that New Zealand's experience may not, in fact probably won't, translate directly to what everywhere else will experience. Because our borders are closed to non-New Zealand citizens and are likely to stay that way for quite a while, there's a massive shortage of workers here. Unemployment is at 4%, a 35-year low. At the same time, because of our very fast Covid recovery, our economy has recovered and is now 0.8% above where it was before the pandemic. This means that when it comes to jobs, it's a workers' market.

Employers know perfectly well that a lot of people have enjoyed working from home and want to keep doing it, and "remote work available" is now a common phrase in job ads. What's more, when employers have tried to force people back into the office, it's not an uncommon experience that they find their entire workforce simply disappears, one by one, to other jobs. There are plenty of jobs available for them to disappear to.

But it's not just that workers here currently have the upper hand - there's been a shift in thinking that I think is likely to translate elsewhere too. During our seven-week lockdown, employers discovered that their workers' productivity didn't drop - in fact, in many cases it increased. At the same time, employers realised that they had a fantastic opportunity to slash the bottom line by saving on office costs. We currently work for several clients, and all of them have moved to smaller buildings or let some office space go, and let their employees work from home some, most or all of the time. Given the growth in our GDP, this clearly hasn't done our economy any harm. I think employers elsewhere are going to see the same advantages.

It's going to be interesting seeing the effects of this. It's clear so far here that CBD businesses that serve workers, like cafes and lunch places, have been hit hard, while there's been a corresponding uptick in business in similar places in the suburbs. 100% great news is the drop in cars on the road in rush hour, saving petrol, cutting emissions and making workers' lives less miserable (Auckland is a commuting nightmare). And it's really clear to us talking to our clients' workers that people who liked working from home and are now doing it permanently, whether full-time or part-time, have had a significant bump in day-to-day happiness. Fingers crossed that post-pandemic we see the same transformation in other countries.