COVID has had some very interesting effects on society. One of the most obvious and most beneficial is the sudden increase in people working remotely. This trend had been slowly building for some time. A variety of companies had begun offering more work from home options or more flexible working hours that allowed employees to set their own schedules. COVID took that trend and kicked it into overdrive. Suddenly almost anyone who did the bulk of their work on a computer was doing it from home. While not everyone has been in love with this development (people like being able to both leave and come back to the house), by and large it seems to be a good thing.
One of the consequences of accelerating the work from home trend is a corresponding rise in many tasks being performed by artificial intelligence. You might be wondering how that could possibly be a good thing. After all, that represents a machine taking a job that belonged to a person. However, the tasks that AI takes on are usually mundane tasks that don’t require a lot of thought. These are largely tasks that involve just crunching numbers or are the equivalent of sorting or moving forms from point A to point B. Other things like chat bots where a person would do nothing more than follow a script anyway are generally taking the place of people. Still, how is this good? People are still out of work aren’t they? Not necessarily.
One of the benefits of having AI take over a lot of the mundane tasks is that people are freer to do work that is more creative in nature. If they don’t have to concern themselves with the more mundane tasks of the workday they can spend more time problem solving, or researching new projects. In short, there is more time for more meaningful work. Such work provides more of a sense of purpose for those doing it and people tend to be happier when they have more purpose in their lives.
What of the working at home aspect? Aren’t people tempted to spend more time goofing off, to not get as much work done? After all, there are good reasons companies have IT departments that monitor employee activity online.
Yes, there is certainly some danger of that. Working from home is the kind of situation where you find out who people really are. While some do take advantage of being unsupervised, you might be surprised that most people might actually work harder when working from home. When given the opportunity, many, if not most people are eager to manage their own schedule through the day. In a dull office building surrounded by cubicles doing monotonous activity without even the comfort of your favorite tunes to keep you going, you might be tempted to steal a few minutes to check the college football rankings, catch up on movie trailers or just the latest news. Then that few minutes turns into an hour.
At home, the dynamic is different. Without big brother watching, people tend to become their own best monitor. Especially when they know they have a certain amount of work to do before they can call it quits for the day. Suddenly, rather than trying to reclaim a few minutes people will actually stop to ask themselves if they are making the best use of their time. What that leads to is people working for less time, allowing them more freedom to pursue their own interests, once again leading to people being more satisfied.
Then there are the people who genuinely love what they do and are passionate about their work. Those fortunate souls tend to actually work more, though it is probably spread out throughout the day, into manageable pieces. That will rankle some who are used to the 9-5 model of work. If that’s you, stop to consider if it matters whether a person works a straight eight hours or six in two or three blocks but all the work gets done anyway? Especially if that latter option leads to happier and more motivated employees? That seems an easy choice.
Though as things eventually head back to something like normal, there will be a temptation to turn the remote work/AI work trend around. Given the many advantages though it is more likely that these trends will only continue, eventually becoming cemented as the new way we do business. TARTLE is already ahead of the curve on this trend, allowing our team, most of whom work from home a great deal of flexibility in hours that helps in their personal lives. It’s all part of the trend to getting power and choices back to the individual.
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