What we can say with certainty is that the sudden shift to distributed work has provided a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine everything about how we do our jobs and how we run our companies. We all know that work will never be the same, even if we don’t yet know all the ways in which it will be different. How many people actually want to work in offices? Stewart Butterfield: CEO and co-founder, Slack The solutions lie with governments, employers and families committed to doing things more equitably. I hope Covid-19 forces us to confront how unsustainable the current arrangement is – and how much we all miss out on when women’s responsibilities at home limit their ability to contribute beyond it. (One is a lot more visible, but it’s built on top of the other!) The unpaid work women do is one of the biggest barriers they face to reaching their potential in the workforce. Of course, the paid and unpaid economies are intimately connected. Women already did about three quarters of that work in the pandemic, the breakdown is even more lopsided. With billions of people staying home, the demand for unpaid work – cooking, cleaning, and childcare – has surged. According to one study, 1.8 times more likely. When the pandemic hit, they were more likely than men to lose those jobs. Women were already clustered in low-paying jobs. Because when the world’s economies were pushed to the brink, it was women who fell over the edge. Will the world finally get serious about gender equality? That’s a question of long standing, but I’m asking it even more insistently now. Melinda Gates: Co-Chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation But we’ve started asking the questions – and here’s what our experts had to say. “We all know that work will never be the same, even if we don’t yet know all the ways in which it will be different,” says Slack co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield. Can we learn from Covid-19 and build better safety nets for the most vulnerable workers? And if the future is digital, how do we make sure swathes of the global population aren’t left behind? We’re also examining what happens to people who can’t work from home as well as those whose jobs depend on a steady flow of traffic into urban hubs. Will we go to the office again – and, if so, how often? What impact will a ‘hybrid’ way of working have on how we communicate, connect and create? Will work-from-home be the great leveller in terms of gender equality and diversity? And what will work mean if our offices are virtual and we lose those day-to-day social interactions? Today, we’re starting by looking at the issue of work: how the pandemic has normalised remote work, and what that might mean. We'll hear from people including Melinda Gates on gender equality, Zoom founder Eric Yuan on the future of video calls, Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler on what’s next in travel and Unesco chief Audrey Azoulay on the ethics of artificial intelligence. We’ll roll out these important views from some of the top minds in business, public health and many other fields in several articles over the next few weeks. We don't know when, or if, our societies might return to normal – or what kind of scars the pandemic will leave.Īmid the upheaval, BBC Worklife spoke to dozens of experts, leaders and professionals across the globe to ask: what are the greatest unknowns we face? How will we work, live and thrive in the post-pandemic future? How is Covid-19 reshaping our world – potentially, forever? Many have made the abrupt shift to working from home millions have lost jobs. Hundreds of millions of people have lived through lockdowns. More than seven months have passed since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic.
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