It has been half a year since we were confined to our homes due to the spread of coronavirus. It wasn’t easy adapting to the new way of life and work. Some found it better and some were struggling to meet deadlines and complained about the increased working hours.
Well, Work from home became part of our lives and doesn’t look like it is going away soon. In the initial days, some companies announced work from home till summer 2021. Google being one.
And some companies started realising the shortfalls of remote working and started looking for better ways of improving productivity.
Whether some companies like it or not, work from home will continue for some time, it seems. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft weighs in on the new way of working.
On September 23, while speaking at an online business summit organised by financial daily The Economic Times Bill said he hasn’t travelled for work this whole year. He said:
Honestly I have got time to do much more. It’s been.. eye-opening for me.
He further added:
It is amazing to see how well the work from home (WFH) culture has worked and I hope will continue even after the pandemic is over. But once this pandemic ends, we will rethink on what percentage of time we spend in offices… 20, 30, 50 per cent. Lots of companies will expect their employees to spend well below 50 per cent of their time in offices and maybe the rest of the companies will go the normal way.
He also stressed on the fact that WFH has not been as engaging, for which software has to improve a lot. Software engineering has surprisingly worked well but when kids are home, homes are small and there are chores, it is difficult to work. For women, they have too many things to handle so WFH comes with its own drawbacks.
About the end of pandemic Bill added:
The message from me and others resulted in very little… Even the US, from which you would expect to have the best response with the great scientific research, did a very poor job in getting ready with this and now we are faced with incredible damage. Hopefully, we will learn our lessons and be better ready next time but in the meanwhile, we have so much work to be done.
