In the middle of a really important online meeting last week, my computer crashed. Well, it didn’t really crash as opposed to me spilling hot coffee on it and it refusing, against all my pleas to go on again but my computer crashing is a better story. Because coffee on my laptop comes with a million questions attached including why I had coffee right next to my laptop. The truth is that I make very many bad decisions and this was one in a long line that I finally paid the consequences for.
This has been one of the highlights of working from home for me. What has yours been? It’s been about a year or more since the pandemic began and work has completely shifted in many ways and probably in ways that aren’t going to go back to normal and I would like to have a conversation about that because we have been talking about going back to normal but what exactly will that look like? Because I don’t think that we’re going back to what things were before. I’ve had my good and my bad days but I have preferred my current working from home arrangement which hasn’t come without its hitches. I got video call fatigue at some point in the beginning. The point at which everyone needed to have a call or a webinar about something. There were literally webinars about how to have webinars. I’ve also enjoyed not working with people full-time in an office because after years of working full-time physically with people, there’s just so much politics you go through on a regular day.
I remember a job I had working a front office job where I got called by my boss to be told that there were complaints about me and my fellow receptionist talking too much in the work bus on our way home. Keep in mind that no one really saw front office people as people, so the only people we could talk to were each other and the support staff like the cleaners and watchmen. But we still had to be silent. I’ve enjoyed the fact that I can do other things with my day and that I can do side hustles when I get the chance because at this point, we need to make money, however much we possibly can.
I was looking through a report by Fuzu, The Future of Work, which tries to explore the talent landscape a year into the pandemic and it was a pretty insightful read, one which young men all over need to read as they figure out how to navigate the space through the pandemic. According to the report, in Africa, a staggering 56 per cent of companies surveyed reported cutting their workforce by more than 10 per cent in 2020 and only 25 per cent of companies who cut staff in 2020 are poised to rebound. This isn’t particularly surprising though because we all know several people who lost their jobs and we know that many of them still haven’t gotten new ones and probably won’t for a while.
Another interesting part of it, which made my heart sing was that nearly 100 per cent of organisations employing flexible models today will continue to do so in the future! I’ve enjoyed not having to think about traffic or what to wear or about clocking in or being asked why you’re leaving early. So that’s honestly something to look forward to! I’ve enjoyed it with one caveat though, there doesn’t seem to be a work-life balance because work is home and home is work.
So I’ve tended to work longer hours and to be expected to work longer hours and calls after 5pm aren’t abnormal, in fact people expect you to be working late. That’s been the experience of people I’ve seen online too where people are making 8pm calls as if it’s normal. Boundaries disappear and I don’t know if they’re going to come back or we just make do with the situation that we have.
I’ve loved the fact that the pandemic suddenly pushed the digital shift and according to Fuzu, that’s here to stay! Yaaay! 65 percent of organisations are set to increase investment in digital solutions as part of a continued wave of digital transformation. As a grand example, who would have thought that the Judiciary would finally go online? That the custodians of the old dusty imperialist wigs would use computers and finally stop talking about how impossible it is? I would have bet on Arsenal winning the league before that. The shift has also meant that the demand to fill tech roles is set to increase, as the push towards digitisation intensifies meaning that it’s never too late to do that coding, data or other course that you’ve been thinking about!
Have you been thinking about the future of work and your career and what that will look like? Will your job still exist in 5-10 years? In what way are you evolving? These are necessary questions that we’ll need to ask ourselves because the pandemic is here for a while and we need to be ahead of the curve. BY DAILY NATION