(12-20)
2020 brought a turning point. Perhaps “BC” will also be read as “Before Corona” in the future. Overnight, entire companies shifted their work from offices to home offices. In the service sector, such as law firms and legal departments, the change happened surprisingly quickly.
In technology, too, the Corona year accelerated and amplified existing developments and trends. In the past, digital videoconferencing was quite difficult for many lawyers to get used to, unless it was absolutely necessary in the context of large transactions or cross-location meetings of their own practice groups. Telephoning was also possible. In the meantime, there are hardly any professionals who have not tried out all common platforms from BlueJeans and GoToMeeting to Micosoft Teams, Veeting, Whereby and Zoom.
Theoretically possible even before, the home office, in the Germany of the Merkel era still sometimes referred to as “home work” with vocabulary from the last industrial revolution, suddenly became the norm. Yet the term home office itself is not a PR masterstroke. It understates what is really taking place.
“Work From Home” is terrible branding because it fails to communicate the fundamental freedom that comes with this new mode.
It’s not about keeping us cooped up in our homes – it’s about allowing us to think and work exactly where we are personally most productive.
Yes, even we at Yaloya Club know that most of us are spatially constrained in our humble dwellings because of COVID-19. However, this snapshot obscures what is actually exciting.
In the long run, the point of the flexibility that Work From Home offers is precisely that you can work from anywhere.
It can be your home – but it can just as easily be a coffee shop, the hospital where a sick family member is lying, a beach, a friend’s house, a hotel. The point of flexibility is to let go of our schedules and the stress that comes with them, and let our work happen where we want it to. Presence culture for presence’s sake is thus likely to be a discontinued model in service professions.
Many of us will choose to work from home, and many of us will habitually return to the same work environment every day, even if it’s not our home. That’s a good thing, too. Flexibility doesn’t mean we have to change everything all the time. It means we can change things when we want and need to. In every crisis lies an opportunity. The change in mindset when working in the 21st century was long overdue.