What will the "new normal" be?

We are getting increasingly frantic panic calls from our beloved Prime Minister, Mr Johnson, that we should stop working from home and return to the office or else the world as we know it will die.

The question we should be asking is; "Is the old world worth saving"? As a pensioner the question of working from home or in the office is irrelevant - home is the office! Prior to my retirement some eight years ago I and many of my IBM colleagues were already working from home some days of the week. When I had to travel in for meetings either at the office or at a customers site I was usually able to arrange things so that I travelled outside of the rush hour. In fact IBM did not have enough office space for everyone to be in the office on a given day; I suspect that they were not alone in this.

I realise that I was fortunate in this, many people who work in shops, factories, cleaners, nurses, doctors, the police etc etc have no choice but to travel to work. But for others why commute?

I also know that somethings such as mentoring & training people are often best done face to face at least at first in order to build a rapport and understanding. It is not impossible to do this over Zoom but initial face to face meetings certainly help the process.

So the working form home movement has been around for quite a few years and was growing. The lockdown has accelerated the process and many do not want to return to the daily commute. Some will, justifiably, be worried about the risks of travelling although they want to return to the office, but others value the freedom and the quality of life that WAH can bring and want to continue doing so.

Yes it does affect those whose jobs were "servicing" the commuters, be it sandwich makers, dry cleaners, tailors, etc etc. But the move to work at home had started was growing, CV-19 simply accelerated it. A new paradigm was going to emerge, perhaps we should concentrate on determining what this should be rather than stop the tide rolling in.

Perhaps if all government ministers, including the PM, were forced to live at least an hours commute from Westminster they would be less keen on forcing others to the daily grind of the commute. After all the PM himself does work from home.