Courtesy The Sacramento Bee
During the COVID pandemic of 2020, ICT advances abruptly ended the commute-in office’s traditional central role in knowledge work with the social distancing measures to curb the spread of the infectious virus.
Those advances had been slowly building since the 1980s starting with personal computers followed by personal communication devices instead of desk phones and the most consequential, the mass market Internet. When the pandemic hit and knowledge work became largely done in a knowledge worker’s home, the momentum of that trend was released like a tightly wound spring. It has generated efforts to rewind the clock spring in the form of return to office mandates and office attendance policies.
It’s also changing the employment bargain between knowledge organizations and their employees. Now that they’ve experienced sustained ability to work from their homes, knowledge workers have come to view commuting differently. Previously, they accepted commuting as part of their jobs. Now they see it as a personal cost that isn’t necessary to incur in order to do their work. Consequently, they’ve grown less likely to accept it.
A prominent example is the relationship between California state government and state employee bargaining units. Now that commuting is seen as a personal cost, it has become a point of negotiation. The state wants staff in state offices four days a week. The employees are pushing for two rather than four days.
Notably, at least one of the bargaining units is looking to boost that stance by leveraging the Golden State’s longstanding efforts to improve air quality by reducing transportation demand and associated motor vehicle emissions, as The Sacramento Bee reports.