One of the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic was that a large part of the population went into telecommuting, at least for a few months, and it has already been suggested that perhaps this is one of the things that will remain, even after the end of the pandemic.
It might be asked if this makes sense – after all, in a more simplistic economic analysis, it would be said that, if telework was even more efficient in many situations than face-to-face work, companies and workers would already be doing it; but in the real world there are probably many things that complicate the process.
Namely: first, and perhaps especially in business/institutional environments, there is a certain fear of appearing "strange" - rather, an employee who would suggest to his boss (in an organization with no traditions of telecommuting) to start working from house ran the risk of raising suspicions like “why is this one asking for this? There must be some up his sleeve – maybe he doesn't think he's going to do any, or maybe he's an antisocial who can't work as a team”;
Or, even if no one thinks that, the employee himself could imagine that they would think and would hesitate to make such a request.
There is also the factor “no one has ever been fired for buying an IBM” – if a middle manager makes a perfectly normal decision and goes wrong, it is natural to think “it's things that happen”; if you make an unusual decision and go wrong, you risk being asked, at the very least, “but where was your head?”.
But, as many workers have been telecommuting for months, this changes social patterns: telecommuting has come to be seen as more “normal”, thus weakening pre-existing resistances.
An additional factor is that, before, managers and administrations would be in doubt whether workers would be as productive in teleworking as in person; now the experience has already been done and, for sure, in many places it has already been observed that “So-and-so produces as much at home as he did here; Beltrano already lowered the performance” and then it is to be hoped that workers who have worked well in telework can continue to do so.
Many of the advantages of telecommuting are relatively intuitive – from avoiding commuting (saving as much time as fuel) to opening the way to more flexible working hours (although this “flexibility” is a two-way street…).
But, having said that, will telecommuting be as common or nearly as face-to-face? Maybe not.
For a start, it is difficult to apply telecommuting to professions in which you work a lot with people or things – it is almost impossible to serve the public in telecommuting and probably even more so to work with physical objects (can you imagine a plumber in telecommuting?); telework seems to be geared towards administrative-bureaucratic or intellectually conceived work.
Second, telecommuting most likely works best for tasks where you already know what to do and how to do it; new situations that involve informal exchanges of opinion among colleagues about how to resolve them present more difficulties.
They can meet via videoconference, but this has some disadvantages compared to face-to-face communication; a videoconference is something that takes place in a defined period of time, when people, while they are together, are not working; in contrast, in an informal exchange of ideas process, what often happens is, when a worker has a question during their work, asking others how they would do it, and immediately resuming work (there is also the reverse of the coin, of course – in the case where workers from the same service are not in the same physical space, maybe they even communicate more easily when all communication is by videoconference).
Worker-initiated innovations (where one worker discovers a more effective way of doing the work and then the new process is gradually being adopted by colleagues) is also likely to become popular faster in a face-to-face environment than in telecommuting.
And finally, for supervisors, it's probably easier to control the productivity of a telecommuting worker if he's doing a regular task that you already know when it should be done, than a new task.
Finally, perhaps one of the biggest problems: the apology for telework often seems to have as reference people who live alone.
But in the real world, most people have families. Unless you are alone at home at work, the typical telecommuter ends up having to manage other requests besides work. For example, what if someone else wants to use the computer? You can take the computer from work, but if people start to have their personal equipment and service equipment at home, problems with space, energy consumption, etc. can start to arise.
Author Miguel Madeira has a degree in Economics from ISEG since 1995.
He has been linked to the Health area since 1999, exercising functions at the University Hospital Center of the Algarve and in the institutions that preceded it (District Hospital of Lagos, Hospital do Barlavento Algarvio, Hospital Center do Barlavento Algarvio and Hospital Center do Algarve).
He has been a member of the Parish of Portimão since 2013.
Note: article published under the protocol between the Sul Informação and the Algarve Delegation of the Order of Economists
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