Boris Johnson asking Civil Servants to go back to their desks as a gesture of reassurance isn't perhaps what they wanted to hear. Some of us have smelt the fresh air and we want it. Boris Johnson wants people to return to offices - one reason is to save the local businesses, but many of these are teetering on unviability and some have leases due to end, many of which will not be taken up again by the current tenants.
Every day since 2016, 15 High Street shops a day closed their doors for good. Pushing people back into offices is not going to work, will not be popular and many will seek to move to working from home jobs if it is denied to them at present when barriers are lifted.
Boris may have a valid point in his gesture, but recent surveys suggest many people now want to work from home permanently. Why not just reduce the rates burden on small businesses to compensate for the loss of trade on the High Street?
Greedy councils charging high parking charges, high rail fares, high fuel costs - why travel if you can avoid it? Surely this reduced travel is better for the environment a point that we are so frequently lectured about.
The lockdown has seen much of the day to day business go on-line and thrive. The genie is out of the bottle, people are going that way in preference to going out to shop. Why struggle into a town, pay a fortune to park, get a fine for overstaying and maybe not get what you want? Why not do it on-line, find what you want and use the time you have not wasted to enjoy yourself? Unless I know I can get what I want in my local town, I buy on-line.
This survey below shows most people want to continue the WFH scenario. Another one I saw showed over 33% wanted full time WFH, 19% to go back to the office 100% of the time and the rest adopt a hybrid model of home and work locations.
WFH works for me because I save more than £2000 a year not travelling to an office to do work I can do from home. I don't have to put up with people I would rather not have to associate with. I don't have to endure office politics, the stress and I get more done. So its a win win situation for me and the business.
I have reduced the stress involved in going to work greatly. All the time I was able to work 5 days a week from home in lockdown, I felt much better being at home, I can start earlier and finish earlier, I don't waste 70 minutes a day travelling to a place I can do without going to and frankly don't want to, just to do the majority of what I can at home.
My quality of life is much better too. It is obvious where my future is - not in an office. I can look out on countryside and have cats around me as I work, real coffee, proper tea, why should I go into an office in a town to be with people who I have to tolerate, when I can do the same work at home with less stress and have no exposure to danger on the roads in my daily commute which I don't have to do?
It just works better all round for me. WFH is great. I want it. It is the future for me.
WFH has been coming - I have been saying for years it should be an option, in 2000 I did partly work from home saving me then 2 hours and 84 miles travelling per day.
We have now replaced the commuter rush hour, we are using less resources to get to do a job - now a zoom call or just working on-line does it for many. Not every job can be done like this but many banks and other businesses are going this way. It saves them buildings only half full.
Why rush to a location where everyone else is rushing to get to a place of work all at the same time frame? This is outdated lunacy in an age when we can go into Space and walk on other Planets.
A salesman from a tool company I know said he is hardly travelling much now due to people changing how they want to do business - people want to do business by phone or on-line it seems. Air travel has been curtailed, in my view a lot of it was not necessary.
Automation is now swallowing more human jobs than ever before
We are now reaching a point where I have been saying for some time that in the next 20 years, many jobs will have been taken over by robots. Since 2009, I have watched the job market decline, both in terms of quality and quantity of jobs.
The demographic time bomb is also kicking in as we have fewer younger people coming into the workplace - the HGV drivers crisis has been coming for years. 5 generations since 1960 have been able to choose to have a family or not - now the deficit of fewer younger employees available to work is coming to be a reality. Robots will help bridge that gap by automating a lot of the boring things we don't have to.
We will need a Basic Income Guarantee System to pay people whose jobs and careers will have been lost to automation. Even niche jobs like Lawyers, Solicitors, Accountants will not be immune from automation. At the other end of the scale, low skilled work like fruit picking can be done more efficiently and cheaper by automation. Humans in the work place are becoming an endangered species. Boris Johnson - this is something you should be aware of. This isn't going away.
A lot of human work is basically quite futile, it can be done by machines better, faster and with less error. Why don't we free up our human society to live proper lives?
We should use this work transition to enrich people's lives. Basic Income means that we can dump the useless, chaotic and draconian Universal Credit system too. We can streamline all benefits with a Basic Income program and cut out job centres, benefits offices and save millions here in this sector and the billions paid out in benefits system errors.
Our human future starts now, with the shift for some to home working, then as the robots take over more human jobs, we can enjoy a better life with a safety net of Basic Income. The money will go round so what is paid out will come back and it will benefit the High Street - with premises being taken for new ventures as the financial safety net is there.
It just needs some vision and to look forward rather than at just the work from home deficit that is current thinking.
Until we can unite all humans on this planet to adopt a plan where we all work together and live peacefully then we will achieve little from the possible open to us.
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