Learning from COVID

It was Friday, March 13th, 2020, almost one year ago, that the message came out that everyone should take their laptops home for the weekend and plan to work from home starting Monday. COVID-19 was spreading, and while there were very few known cases in Minnesota, several major employers on the West and East coasts had already gone to remote work. So this was no surprise. At the time most of us thought we might be working from home for six weeks, maybe a few months tops. Even the pessimists figured we would be back in the office by the end of summer.

Now that we’ve been working under pandemic rules for 49 weeks, the optimists are saying that maybe things will be back to “normal” (whatever that is) by the end of this coming summer. The pessimists are saying it won’t be until sometime in 2022.

You can count me among the super-optimists: I think most people don’t appreciate just how quickly vaccine doses are rolling out, and how much the pace is likely to accelerate over the next couple months. Our most trusted public health expert is saying that by April—just over a month away—everyone will be eligible to get a vaccine, and a major news outlet reported a few days ago that by early this summer there will be enough doses available to vaccinate more than 100% of the U.S. population. I think there’s a good chance that by May or June most pandemic restrictions will be lifted in the U.S. and we will be in the middle of the Great Reopening.

COVID-19 has been among the greatest tragedies I’ve lived through. But even the worst tragedy is also an opportunity for the survivors to learn and grow. Over the past year we’ve all learned new ways to live, work, and play, and some of these new ways are better than the old. I hope we don’t lose them in the rush to return to pre-pandemic life.

Work Anywhere

Even as the Internet has enabled more and more remote work over the past 20 years, many employers have (irrationally, in my view) been slow to embrace it. All that changed in just a couple weeks last spring, and while not all employers are fully on board, many large companies have discovered what their employees have been saying for years now.

For many jobs, you can do most of the work just as well remotely as from the office. Often better.

So forcing every employee to commute every single day seems likely to become like three-martini lunches and casual sexual harassment, an unlamented relic of a bygone era.

My hope is that we will instead see negotiated and individualized work plans become the norm. Many people will want to spend some days in the office and some at home, and it makes sense for teams to agree on common “office days” for collaborative work. High performers who can show they can get the job done may be given even more flexibility, and working remotely from a resort or vacation home may become the hot new perk.

The Great Unsorting

Over the past few decades in the U.S. one of the big demographic trends has been the increasing concentration of wealth and educated knowledge workers in big cities. This has not been entirely healthy for the country, as it can lead to people in more rural areas to feel left behind and resentful.

It turns out, though, that some of these smaller towns and cities are really nice places to live, at least for people who appreciate quiet streets and big yards for kids to run around.

With more jobs becoming “work anywhere,” especially high-paying highly-skilled jobs, there’s an opportunity in the post-COVID world for some people to move from the big cities back to smaller towns and more rural areas (as long as there’s good Internet access). This, in turn, could help heal some of our urban/rural divisions, distributing wealth and opportunity more broadly, and lowering the heat on some of our political polarization.

Internet Lifeline

All the new opportunities depend on having fast, reliable, and reasonably-priced Internet service. I think in the pandemic we realized that Internet service is no longer a nice-to-have, but essential for anyone to be fully engaged in work, school, and civic life.

In the United States we’ve been hamstrung by the lack of a coherent national broadband policy. This has allowed Internet service to become dominated by unregulated monopolies, offering poor service at high prices and huge areas of the country without true broadband service.

Now that we all understand just how important Internet service is in the 21st century, I’m hopeful that this will finally create the political will to regulate residential Internet access as a lifeline service, the same way we ensure that everyone in the country has access to reasonably-priced lifeline telephone service. The cable monopolies and phone companies will fight this tooth and nail, of course, but we’ve reached a point where smaller communities either need to solve for the Internet or die.

Dogs and Cats and Kids

One of the most delightful features of COVID life is how pets and children regularly intrude on our work lives. I think everyone has seen a coworker’s cat walk in front of the camera, or heard a presentation interrupted with a little voice calling, “Mommy?”

It charms me every time. I hope we never go back to a world where the standards of professionalism require that everyone pretend they have no life or responsibilities outside work.

These moments where life intrudes on work help us stay connected as whole human beings, not just machines which output PowerPoint. And more humanity is something we can always use in the workplace.