Bubble Thought #4 - Home Office Lessons : Detlef Palm

I don’t know about you, but it has been many years I have been to a dance-club. We do not live in places where we have to ride the subway to buy some cheese. And if you do, you don’t need to so during the rush hour. While a somewhat-higher-than-average risk group, we UN retirees seem to be only mildly affected by the pandemic, generally speaking. Corona keeps the pesky little grandchildren away, so we can concentrate on doing projects, tending to our gardens, watching television, creating artwork. We remember the best time of our lives, which was spent with UNICEF in distant countries. Or we write nasty bubble-thoughts.

Of course, our hearts and thoughts go out to our active UNICEF colleagues. Just about one third of all international professional posts (ca 1450 people, according to Insight, the reporting portal of the corporate database) are based in one of the worst global Corona hotspots, New York. Most UNICEF staff are labouring in their home-office with little chance of returning to their office-office anytime soon.

McKinsey and others have studied it: companies are disposing of office space; productivity in think-businesses has not declined; staff liberated from long commutes can enjoy a better balance of their professional and private lives. My own review confirms that decisions taken online by the Executive Board are no worse than those taken before the crisis. Yesterday I read that writers and brokers are beginning to tele-commute from the Caribbean.

Perhaps the UNICEF Office of Innovation will be the forerunner in challenging long-held assumptions about how work should be done. I do not want to pre-empt its discoveries, but office space will be condensed to few meeting rooms; almost all cubicles become redundant; their occupants, who rarely attend a meeting, will have to continue to work from home. UNICEF gives up its space in 633 on 3rd Avenue. To resist the temptation to revert to old models of doing business, work processes will by default be reconstructed digitally– putting the burden of proof on those who argue for a return to pre-Corona methods.

Here comes the best: It doesn’t matter where you call your home, as long as you have a functioning internet connection. The global authority on children is not necessarily a densely packed group of New York urbanites. Expertise is everywhere. The posts of those working from their homes in Up- and Downtown, Westchester, Queens and New Jersey will be abolished and recreated in Bangladesh, Malawi, Albania and Colombia. During their coffee break, the experts can get mud on their boots, and expose themselves to the reality we are trying to change. And they will have the best time of their lives.

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