My Take | The virtues of working from home
- Studies show that productivity actually increases and companies can save on rent with the kind of flexibility that has been introduced during the coronavirus crisis
Some debates are perennial and may never be definitively settled. Among those are nature vs nurture, and creativity vs discipline in education. To these, we can now add home working vs the office.
One thing about the Covid-19 pandemic is that it is forcing companies to rethink the virtue and necessity of allowing people to work from home. Even bosses who are control freaks have to make allowance for such work flexibility in times of crisis.
That probably reinforces the prejudice of people against home working by portraying home workers as slackers and procrastinators. But the incident did generate a good deal of healthy debate in Hong Kong, which is still traditionalist when it comes to keeping workers in offices. I, for one, wouldn’t be so quick to condemn the youngsters. Such outdoor activities are not at all unusual for corporate team-building.
Technology – online connectivity, and sophisticated but user-friendly software – has made home working perfectly viable. When I first started as a reporter in the early 1990s, you really needed a centralised office to produce a paper. Now, even if the Post’s headquarters goes under, it’s still possible to turn out a newspaper by remote working.
