Workforce after the Pandemic

The pandemic has changed a lot of our working styles. I was recently watching an interview of Sridhar Vembu the CEO of Zoho corporation talking about his move to the rural areas and building companies and workforce there and I am just mirroring his thoughts through this post. It is fascinating to imagine a world post-pandemic in this way.

Imagine if the pandemic is meant as a force of God to make the world a more decentralized place. With the growth of social networking and the Internet, communication with people has become easier than before. I still remember in the early 2000s where only one person in the house could afford a mobile phone and there was a landline apart from a mobile phone which was used by the entire family. Messages were generally conveyed through voice or through letters if there is an urge to write. Today I sit miles away from home and still speak with my parents face to face with reasonable clarity.

With bitcoin and dogecoin making big noise in the world it's time we think about decentralization as a concept for life as well. As a thought experiment, I would like to imagine how workplaces can be structured in a decentralized fashion.

Co-Working spaces closer to home

Instead of a centralized workforce sitting in one office (for work that can be done online and from home) we can have co-working space that can be sponsored by the office. A good way to think about this is to have a co-working space for a block and it can be a community experience for these people to work together.

Partial Work from home and Partial office

This is an idea that can be used to save space. We can have teams meeting 2 days a week to conduct their face-to-face activities in person and the rest of the time we can work from home. By doing this the companies can save a lot of space and offer flexibility to employees.

Complete remote work

The teams which mostly does communicate on online platforms due to pandemic without loss of efficiency can aim to have completely remote teams. Just access to a decent internet connection would mean work can be done from smaller towns, suburbs, etc. This also improves the local economy and infrastructure a lot. This would mean software engineers in rural Indian villages need better internet connection thereby forcing the ISP to bring the infrastructure.

While all the above options are for work that can be done just by using internet connections and where people just sit on a desk the whole day, this is not possible for many fields such as manufacturing, logistics, etc which need physical work that needs to be done.