There is one constant that applies pre- during and post-Covid. Market driven economies adapt continuously to the changing tastes of consumers and the opportunities technology provides to supply them more profitably. Best practice
evolves so that firms can attract their essential business partners, their workers, supervisors, and capital providers on market driven terms.
Businesses and their supply chains including their supplies of labour and skills have sometimes to respond to circumstances that are beyond their control and they could not have anticipated. As with the Covid lockdowns. They
were an extreme form of government interference in the roles economic agents may ordinarily choose to play. With outcomes that few would describe as predictable or fair.
This forced households and businesses to adjust rapidly to dramatically changed circumstances to minimize losses as best they could. The Covid economy offered grave dangers and some opportunity. It accidentally produced a few big
winners and many more losers for whom income or debt relief from their governments, who caused them so much damage, seems only fair. Businesses as usual will be doing all they can, to accurately anticipate our preferences and
actions as consumers, as suppliers of labour and skills, and as providers of capital.
The Covid economy has proved that if your job is to deliver a service and the only machine you need with which to combine your labour and intelligence, is a computer, you can work anywhere, including home. And connectivity to other
computers is bound to improve and become less expensive. Wider choices have therefore presented themselves to both sides of the employment nexus.
Trade-offs of income for other benefits including the quality of the working environment have always to be made. Who indeed pays for the Google campus and how valuable are its benefits? Ask Google. The requirements and solutions for
business success will differ from firm to firm. Yet first mover advances in the right new direction are very valuable. It takes time for the competition to latch on, catch up and compete away the temporarily high returns to owners and the
superior benefits they may provide to attract “best of breed”.
In the post-Covid economy how much of our incomes will be earned from our homes? And how much will we play in or outside, in restaurants, resorts and cruise-liners. (Merely mentioning them makes me salivate in anticipation of happier
times) Will our output, be higher or lower working from home, or higher in face-to-face collaboration with colleagues and fellow workers at a more or less distant work-place? The owner of a business, to survive, is compelled to measure
what employees deliver, wherever they may deliver it or wish to deliver.
Potential and actual employees will also be estimating the extra benefits and extra space costs working from home. Benefits that include more time for leisure or to bring up their children? Clearly very little is produced commuting to
work. Potential income and leisure are sacrificed in the time commuting, or higher actual or owner equivalent and market rentals are incurred reducing the time and costs of getting to the office, factory or warehouse. The savings in
time and money and office or house rentals are open to trade-offs, experimentation and ultimate resolution. The providers of transport, cars, busses, trains above and below ground, aircraft and highways, not to mention office
buildings, will be predicting and observing the outcomes.
Workers would have to accept less pay to work at home should they prove less productive there and prefer to do so. They can expect to earn more if the opposite proves true. Or will employers have to offer them more to get them to
come to the office, to bear the extra costs of commuting? Should they be expected to be more productive and creative in F2F collaboration. Which may well be a lot more fun and even worth sacrificing some income and leisure and time at
home for. We will find out what mix of income and salary and working conditions work best and for whom. There will be no cookie cutter solutions. We should be confident that the process can best be left to work out in the usual, successful,
evolutionary way.