In her televised address to the nation back in April, Her Majesty the Queen invoked the spirit of the Blitz. In years to come, she hoped, the people of Britain would take pride in their response to the pandemic. The “attributes of self-discipline, of quiet good-humoured resolve and of fellow-feeling” – connecting as they do generations of Britons past and present – would see us through.
Four months on, what we see is a mixture of admirable and not so admirable behaviour. Have the authorities done all they could to harness the national spirit the Queen invoked or have they contributed to the very anxiety they should be in the business of remedying?
ShareHaving looked at the costs and benefits of homeworking from the perspectives of employees and employers, Christopher Lake and Adam Gold broaden the discussion to consider the externalities of homeworking – its costs and benefits to wider society. They argue that while the pandemic opens up the possibility of social and economic renewal, it also contains the seeds of systemic damage – damage that has innocent and small-scale beginnings in calculations on the part of individual employees and employers that the benefits of homeworking outweigh the costs for them. Christopher and Adam claim that policy-makers, charged with the task of charting our collective future and the wellbeing of the overall system, do not have the luxury of leaving the market to take its course in the hope everything will turn out fine in the end.
ShareWhether in terms of cost savings, employee satisfaction, or access to new streams of employees, homeworking appears to be good news for employers. Christopher Lake and Adam Gold caution employers against getting carried away: homeworking poses a challenge to the social fabric of the firm and its ability to innovate and survive, and shines a light on its responsibility to keep people and knowledge safe.
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