[ad_1]
For the average stockholmer, the commute to work takes about 35 minutes. We do it twice a day, five days a week. This means that the new army of domestic workers in the capital, low count, currently saves 100,000 days on public transport and on the roads every week.
Telecommuting has several of these benefits. Peace of mind. Freedom and flexibility. Just under 20 percent of those who responded to DN / Ipso’s survey this summer want to work more from home after the pandemic.
But here it is also there A hole. Of course, bus drivers and preschool educators cannot work from home. And it fits away from everyone. Telecommuting can be wage slavery under house arrest. An unwanted mix of work and private life.
The transition to more telecommuting is not trivial. It is true that our natural workplace used to be home. It was there, or near the knot, that agriculture, crafts, and other activities continued for millennia.
But in Europe it has not been like that for a long time. Capitalism is working for someone else.
If it stops suddenly, it should affect our job market, housing, infrastructure, and our cities. To name a few things.
But a more basic one The question is whether the task works.
It does, according to a 2013 Chinese-American study that drew attention during the pandemic.
The experiment was carried out in a large travel agency in Shanghai. The company had its operators – those who book hotels and airline tickets to call customers – sign up for a work-from-home lottery. Four out of five business days worked by test participants from a fully equipped home office.
They increased their productivity by 13 percent. Also, they became happier.
Carry off.
Photo: child, Heiko
But only to a small extent was the efficiency gain due to the fact that employees actually did more during their working hours. Almost all of the productivity gains occurred instead of home-based workers taking fewer breaks and taking fewer sick leave. They just worked harder.
Commuting to and from work takes an average of more than 1.5 hours in Shanghai. You will have plenty of time and energy if you avoid it.
That people tend During the pandemic it has been confirmed to work more while sitting at home. A survey shows that Americans who telecommute spend about a third of the time saved commuting to more jobs.
The numbers are spread around productivity itself. A Japanese study shows that homework during the pandemic is predominantly less effective. In a large British survey last summer, responses were divided: just under 30 percent said they had become more productive working from home. Like many said they had done less.
According to a German study, the increased sense of control and satisfaction in teleworking is also a temporary effect.
There is a pretty Elegant study on another group of telephone operators that, together with the example of Shanghai, show the differences between jobs.
Here, investigators observed the Manchester Police Emergency Service. Two policemen are sitting in front of their computers when they receive a call: one receives the call and the other sends instructions to the patrol cars. The emergency services police are matched according to who is available. They can sit in the same room or in different seasons.
The question the researchers asked was whether physical distance affects efficiency.
It does. The alarm service police cooperate faster if they are allowed to sit together. Especially close makes a difference in the case of more complicated alarms.
Somewhere around 40 percent of all jobs in Sweden it is believed to be technically and physically possible to perform remotely. But that something is technically possible is not the same as that it is better.
An advantage of the giant task experiment now underway is that people can examine the benefits and problems that come up in different tasks and jobs.
Surely the subsequent remote work will have something of a breakthrough. The trend was there before. But some of the downsides won’t be immediately apparent. Physical closeness between people, many studies show, is essential for effective dissemination and innovation of knowledge. An economy populated by hermits therefore runs the risk of becoming a stupid economy.
More jobs are coming make sure you have a bigger mix of office work and homework in the future. One advantage is that it can open up labor markets that were previously geographically limited. Employees can be recruited from various places, without moving.
But there are pitfalls here. Organizational researcher Tsedal Neeley at Harvard has long studied geographically fragmented workplaces. Thales, according to Neeley’s research, seem prone to generating some kind of imbalance and conflict. In a hybrid workplace, where some sit together and others are satellites, we run the risk of embittering each other.
Of course, there are real benefits in the home labor market as well. This can be especially true for women. Long travel times are in almost all contexts a greater limitation on professional life for women than for men.
If teleworking leads to a geographic equalization of the labor market, it can be a great benefit for gender equality.
Because the national economy can more telecommuting at the same time provides big savings. In human time, of course. But also in valuable office space.
Which in turn creates losers at the same time. A company like Vasakronan, owned by the AP funds of the state pension system, has hundreds of billions of crowns tied to offices and shops.
Here is the risk of large losses. In Vasakronan’s case, it affects pensions.
In the housing market, the effects are more difficult to predict. The pandemic has shown that homework makes people yearn for larger areas, in all situations. But the villas have risen more in price than the apartments. That trend can continue.
One of the big losers from the pandemic, the transportation sector, is also likely to be affected by telecommuting in the future. Public transportation is bleeding. Fewer business trips will undermine the conditions for good frequency and new investments. Which in turn can affect those who need to go to work every day in the future as well.
The virtual workplace of the future, if it becomes a reality, will not benefit everyone.
Read more texts by Carl Johan von Seth
