The Great Return: What will our working lives look like post-pandemic?

Are you ready for the Great Return? As Covid-19 restrictions begin to be rolled back, talk around the virtual water-cooler is all about going back to the office, but what will this mean for Ireland’s two-million-plus workforce? Will we all be herded back into our workspaces, like errant cattle rounded up and corralled back in the pen after a year and a half in the wide open spaces? Or will our working lives be more free-range, with a blend of working from home and popping into the office when required? Or will companies embrace the new remote working culture and allow their employees to choose between office and home?

[ The Irish Times ePaper ]

In late August, the Government unveiled its plans for reopening society, encouraged by the high take-up of vaccination, and spurred on by the very real need to get commercial life back up and running after months of uncertainty. The plan is for a phased reopening of workplaces from September 20th, with almost all Covid-19 restrictions to be lifted by October 22nd.

So, after 18 months of working from home, we’re going to have to bite the bullet and venture back into the office, and to many of us who have got settled into our home working lives, it may seem like a strange, alien environment. We’ve been used to just wandering into the spare room with a cup of coffee, and having our families around us while we work. Now we’ll have to drag ourselves out of our comfort zone, navigate full-capacity public transport again, and deal with the inevitable increase in crowds as the world and its granny goes back to business. Do we even remember where we left our Leap card?

Vaccination status

One of the big uncertainties is how employers plan to manage the return to work, and what protocols will be put in place to ensure workers are kept safe while on companies' premises. And the biggest question mark is over workers' vaccination status. In the United States, Google and Facebook have both said that only staff members who have been fully vaccinated will be invited to return to their desks.

This has given rise to legal headaches, as unvaccinated employees claim they are being discriminated against. In a country where vaccine take-up is still astonishingly low, this has become a political hot potato. On this side of the pond, however, under GDPR rules, employers will not be permitted to ask their employees if they are vaccinated. An exception will be made for employers operating in healthcare settings, but most other businesses will be prevented from demanding that employees show proof of vaccination.

But such is the high take-up of vaccines in Ireland, many business groups believe that this will not be a huge issue, and companies can assume that a large enough percentage of their workforce will be vaccinated. Whatever their employees' vaccination status, firms will still have to have strong measures in place to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in the workplace – so bosses can't use vaccination as an excuse to be lax on safety standards.

To complicate things further, Government guidelines suggest fully vaccinated people will not have to self-isolate if they are a close contact in a case of Covid, so if there is a case of Covid in your workplace, and you have to stay at home for two weeks, your boss might just twig that you haven’t been vaccinated.

But as the Great Return draws closer, it's clear that companies are looking to be flexible with their employees, and will try to facilitate hybrid working for their staff whenever and wherever possible. While many companies will start reinstalling workers gradually from September 20th, some are taking a cautious approach and holding back until October. Apple, however, alarmed by the surge in Covid-19 cases in countries such as the US, and the unstoppable spread of the Delta variant, is putting back its official return to the office until at least January 2022, at which time employees will be required to be in the office three days a week. Many other big firms are following suit and opting to postpone the Great Return until the first quarter of next year.

Companies in Ireland are busy drawing up their post-Covid working policies, and most are expected to offer hybrid working models to their staff going forward. Professional services firms KPMG, Deloitte, PwC and Grant Thornton have said they will follow a hybrid working model, with staff expected to come into the office two or three days a week, and work at home the rest of the week. KPMG managing partner Seamus Hand said that staff at the company have a "desire for greater flexibility, more autonomy and a more hybrid way of working", and that "these preferences will guide the principles that we will apply in our future work plans". The office will remain central to the work model, and will be used for collaborative work, training and upskilling, client meetings and other in-person interactions.

A spokeswoman for Deloitte said that 90 per cent of its staff have indicated a preference for remote work to be incorporated into working practices in the future, but staff have also “missed the connectivity” of the workplace. “We see a great opportunity for new ways of thinking about work,” she said. “We don’t see a one-size-fits-all approach given the variety of work we do and the different career and life stages of our people.”

Pushback

Many other companies are expected to offer hybrid working options to their staff, but what about staff members who are happy out working from home and don’t want to join the Great Return to the office? For many employers, the WFH genie is out of the bottle, and bosses might have a hard time coaxing some of their staff members back into the workplace. Many companies are seeing a pushback against going back to the office among staff members, with some saying they’d rather quit than have to go back to the office full-time.

An Ipsos survey of 2,700 workers across nine countries – the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, India, China and Australia – found that more than a third of those surveyed said they would pack in their job if their employer tried to force them back into the workplace.

Google recently announced that it would "penalise" some of its staff who choose to work remotely, if they live in an area with lower living costs than their office location. So, if your preference is to work from a sleepy village where the only major cost is your broadband connection rather than in the bustling city, where everything from rent to transport to eating out costs a fortune, Google may take that into consideration when payday comes around. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have also indicated that they may do the same with their remote employees, so before you snap up that cosy cottage in the countryside to live out the rest of your working life, check to see how that will impact on your salary.

So, what are your rights if you don’t want to be dragged kicking and screaming back into the office? Can you force your employer to allow you to work from home, and what’s to stop them passing you over for promotion if you choose not to be physically in the office? In January, the Government published its remote-work strategy, Making Remote Work, which outlined plans to make remote working a “permanent feature in the Irish workplace in a way that maximises economic, social and environmental benefits”.

As part of the strategy, the Government plans to legislate for the right to request remote working, so employers will not only be required to offer you the option to work from home, they will also be expected to give you all the same opportunities for career progression as your physically-present colleagues. To set an example, the Government plans to mandate that home and remote work should be the norm for 20 per cent of public-sector workers, and it will address the issue of remote and hybrid working in the next budget.

However things shake out, it looks like hybrid working is here to stay, and it could work to the mutual benefit of both employers and employees. There’s bound to be a lot of issues to hammer out between bosses and workers over the next while, but the hope for us all is to find a happy medium where we can all work in harmony – and with the Covid monkey off our backs.