Digital divide

With the disruption that has come about in the workforce paradigm, people management will be the most important part of a leader’s task.

- MORGEN WITZEL

We have seen a worldwide revolution in working practices over the past few months—or have we? With the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent periods of lockdown, hundreds of millions of people had to adapt, often overnight, to working remotely from home. Thousands of offices were abandoned while people converted spare rooms or kitchen tables to working space. People who had never heard of Zoom or Microsoft Teams were forced to become instantly familiar with them. And on the whole, so far, it has worked pretty well.

But will digital working, or remote working, continue? Can it? Should it? These are the questions being asked at the moment in companies all around the world as lockdowns ease and it becomes possible for employees to return to their places of work. I teach on a senior leadership programme at the University of Exeter in the UK, where the participants are in senior positions in private companies and the public sector, and they are wrestling with these questions every day. In this article, I will reflect a little on their experience and my own, and weigh up the pros and cons of digital working.

There have been many positives. One of these is flexibility. People can often work when they want and are not bound by strict hours. This has been a boon to workers who are also carers or who have children. Second, there is no need to commute to the office. This saves workers a great deal of time, and in some cases quite a lot of money, and gives them more leisure time and a better quality of life. Commuting, even by public transport, also increases air pollution, and many studies have shown how people benefitted from better air quality during the lockdown.