How the pandemic means work just got personal

How the pandemic means work just got personal

For all the social change in the UK over the past 30 years, employees have still been expected to leave their personal lives at the door. Work life and home life were expected to be kept separate.

As Andrew Hill, management editor at the FT, has pointed out in a new piece on the Future of Work, the pandemic has “triggered a radical re-think” of how we work, including new attitudes to the work/home divide: “before coronavirus struck, the future of work looked uncertain: algorithms and artificial intelligence; shifting demographics and globalisation; the move to outsourcing and part-time work; the endless demand for new skills.” The human element to working life was increasingly under pressure.

But the shift to working from virtual spaces, spare rooms and kitchen tables, has “made leaders appreciate not only staff members’ hidden skills but also their personal hinterland… the many responsibilities of individuals’ matrix workers, if you like, not only to line managers but to their families and communities”.

Hill concludes that an urgent priority for businesses and the ‘hybrid workplace’ is not only to find ways to integrate employees who are working from a physical HQ with those working from home, but close the divide between those who have a comfortable set-up for continuing to work and those having to manage multiple caring responsibilities, who don’t have a quiet place to work from – where home life brings disruptive challenges.

“Personal lives have always been seen as the enemy of efficiency and productivity. Staff have been expected to show their commitment by minimising or even forgetting any other kinds of responsibilities,” said EAPA chair Eugene Farrell.

“It’s also clear that some people are not only enjoying, but preferring, WFH and the new way of life it has given them. Now is the time for employers to have those conversations with employees about what they want and how it can work as a long term solution.

“Covid-19 and the sudden, enforced blurring of work with home lives – along with the universal impact of the pandemic threat – has exposed the fundamental interdependence between the two. People might not have been talking about issues at home, but that didn’t mean they weren’t always feeling them, that their work performance wasn’t being affected.

“Employers can no longer ignore the range and complexity of stresses that people are under – or the importance of providing professional support for the long-term. Because it’s all the strength, energy, creativity of motivated and engaged people that will see us through the ongoing crisis. ”