How we work now - lessons from lockdown
The Bottom Line
BBC
4.6 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Zoom meetings and working from home. Two habits which office workers have picked up during the enforced lockdown. But will these behaviours habits stick? Some believe that if more of us choose to work from our spare rooms on a regular basis, this will have profound implications for offices, commuting, human interaction and productivity. Evan Davis and guests discuss whether current predictions about the death of the office are over-exaggerated.
Guests
André Spicer, Professor of Organisational Behaviour, City's Business School, University of London Rachel Higham, Managing Director of IT at BT Katrina Kostic Samen. Head of Workplace - Strategy and Design, Development. KKS Savills
Produced by Lesley McAlpine
The programme is produced in association with The Open University
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.1 | Hello and welcome to the programme. |
| 0:07.4 | And in this series of the bottom line, |
| 0:09.0 | we're focusing on the many longer-term implications of the COVID crisis, the aftermath. |
| 0:14.1 | And among white-collar office workers, there are two effects of lockdown talked about more than any other. |
| 0:19.9 | The Zoom meeting and working from |
| 0:23.1 | home, which has its own acronym, WFH. Now, this doesn't apply to builders or workers in shops, |
| 0:28.6 | hotels or factories, but the daily office experience for those that can work remotely has moved |
| 0:34.4 | from offices to home offices. Some can't wait to get back to their desk, |
| 0:39.1 | but others are saying, now we've seen it can work. Why not keep this going after COVID |
| 0:43.5 | with implications for commuting for offices, IT, human interaction, productivity, commercial |
| 0:49.7 | property supply. So we thought we'd devote the program today to thinking about these matters, |
| 0:55.3 | how we work, lessons from the pandemic. Obviously there's the period to think about while |
| 1:00.5 | COVID is still a threat, but also beyond that. And I'll confess straight away, I'm a mild |
| 1:06.3 | skeptic that we'll choose to keep lockdown life going when we're free to gather, free to gather without |
| 1:12.7 | worrying about who needs to unmute their laptop in the meeting. Now, I've two people on the line. |
| 1:18.7 | I'd much rather they were here, to be honest, but it's not a good idea to gather in a studio. |
| 1:22.9 | Both of them have thought a lot about these matters. Let's meet them and Rachel Hym, |
| 1:26.9 | managing director of |
| 1:28.1 | IT at BT, first of all. And Rachel, are you working at home yourself? Have you been doing that over |
| 1:34.6 | lockdown? Entirely, yes, for the four 14 weeks. I've been working from my home office in the New |
| 1:40.1 | Forest. Okay, well, we'll hear about BT more generally very shortly. Let me introduce |
... |
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