Now | Short Term | Mid Term | Long Term While this quotation from Lenin has opened numerous articles and blogs recently, we make no apology for using it, as it perfectly articulates the turbulent times we’re living through. In his TED talk of April 2015, which has now been viewed by 25M people, Bill Gates foretold the current scenario. He’s recently made an authoritative prediction that a vaccine for Covid-19 will be created within 18 months.While the fallout from coronavirus changes daily, we’re starting to get a picture of how our world of work might shape up over the next eighteen months or so, and it is becoming clear that we need to think in pre and post-vaccine terms.

Until we’ve engineered a vaccine that can be upscaled at the volume required for our global population, it may be that we migrate from complete lockdown to partial lockdown and, in all likelihood, back again, for an extended period. Some of us will be able to move around and have access to multiple sites, including our workplaces, but such privileges will clearly be age, health, proof of our infection status and location dependent. Within our working environments, new rules of social distancing or separation will require each of us to alter our behaviours. Organisations, whatever their size, will all need to encourage new ways of working, and these will undoubtedly require everyone to access previously untapped levels of resilience, flexibility and cooperation

Many of us now believe that our future cannot be the same as our past: in fact few would dare to suggest that the post-vaccine world will simply resort to how things were pre-January 2020. Without indulging in speculation or conjecture, we at Orangebox would like to raise the lid on ideas that we think could help us all get to grips with the challenges we’re likely to encounter in the ‘new normal’ world of work. With as many as a quarter of the world’s population now estimated to be living under some form of coronavirus lockdown, governments globally have had to quickly create stimulus packages aimed at mitigating the effects of turning the tap off on their economies. In the UK alone as of early April, over three million employees have been furloughed under a UK government scheme (via HMRC and the Treasury) that will pay 80% of the wages of normal pay, capped at £2,500 per staff member a month.

The cost to the British taxpayer is estimated at up to £40 billion for the first three months alone. Back in 2012, Orangebox’s Research & Insight team created its first report, Boomers & Millennials, which focused on the two ‘bookend’ generations, showing the likely generational differences our clients were going to be facing in the workforce. For this report, we again explore the challenges our clients are likely to face in the new workplace; we once again shine a spotlight on two bookend generations. This first insight opens the conservation and part two will be from the perspective of the younger workforce, whom many believe will be the hardest hit by the Corvid-19 crisis. At one end, there’s the 50 to 60-year-old who’s nearing the end of their career and has a comfortable family home with, if they’re fortunate, a pleasant garden in which there’s enough space to create a home office. At the other, there’s the late 20 to 30-year-old, still in the foothills of their career, who’s more likely than not living – and now working – in a city apartment, with the dining table as their new workplace and the bedroom the best place for Zoom team working. 

For this Smartworking insight we explore the implications for our new world of work now, and in the short, mid and long-term.

Read the full story here: https://www.orangebox.com/knowledge/insight_news?o=overlay/article/smartworking-post-january-2020