Tom Johnson is Managing Director of Trajectory, a leading trends and foresight consultancy. Tom and Trajectory use data and forecasting techniques to understand changing consumer behaviour and map out the future.
Last week, the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) closed to new applicants as the Treasury starts to taper the support given during the lockdown. For the millions of workers who have been on furlough at some point since March this represents the start of getting back to work.
But what will work look like? For many people – myself included – the way we work has changed. I have gone from working full time, usually in an office, but just as often travelling around the country to working entirely at home. Meetings, presentations and research interviews now take place via Zoom – or whatever platform the client prefers – and I haven’t travelled anywhere for work, or seen a colleague face to face, since the middle of March.
This is a pretty common experience for people in service economy jobs, and especially for those in higher social grades – A, B and C1. These are the office jobs that can be fairly easily transplanted into an office-less world. Many other jobs – in particular, many jobs performed by people in lower (C2, D and E) social grades – cannot. This means that the future of work looks very different by socio-economic sector.
How has work changed since the lockdown started?
We get a good picture of the recent shifts and likely future developments from our recent consumer survey. Overall, 37% of workers were working from home in May – more than twice as many as usually do. At the same time, 32% were still working in their place of work and 23% were on furlough. But expectations for the months ahead are very different. More than half of those on furlough in May expect to be back in their workplaces in July, but the majority of those that have been working from home in recent months expect to still be at home over the next couple of months. We’re not all going back to work – some of us are going to stay where we are.
The chart below reveals how this breaks down by social grade:
Source: Trajectory Optimism Index, May 2020
Put simply, the big change for ABC1 workers over the past few months has been to shift to working at home and most of those currently working at home will continue to do so. For C2DEs, however, the big shift has been going on furlough, and soon, coming off, furlough.
What does this mean?
In the immediate short term, more office-based jobs will continue to be done away from the office – the workplace will cease to exist in the traditional sense. For other jobs, the workplace will change: more PPE, screens, social distancing rules and shift work will change the nature and timing of work – but it will still happen in the place it used to.
These adaptations are designed to minimise risk, but they cannot eradicate it completely. In the working age population as a whole the mortality rate for Covid-19 is 9.9 for men and 5.2 for women (that means out of every 100,000 men aged between 20 and 64 in the UK, 9.9 will die of Covid-19). For professional occupations – which includes many office jobs and jobs in the ABC1 bracket – this falls to 5.4 for men and 4.2 for women. For lower skilled elementary professions – jobs in the DE bracket – this rises, to 6.1 for women and 21.4 for men. Coronavirus may not discriminate, but the social economic context absolutely does.
In the longer term the pandemic will accelerate automation. In ordinary circumstances, this would happen relatively slowly – allowing for new jobs to be created by technology, as always happens – and would affect routine jobs both in higher and lower social grades. But an accelerated timetable and a particular focus on automating those jobs – in retail, delivery, transport and manufacturing – that most depend on humans currently will disproportionately affect lower social grades.
Working from home is a challenge for many people: but going back to work, especially for those in the C2DE bracket is fraught with much greater dangers in both the short and the long term. While many of us have ditched the office for good – and some us will even be enjoying that – the reality for millions of others is very different.
This article first appeared on Trajectory's subscription portal, Signal. Click here to find out more about Trajectory and to sign up for their (free) newsletter.