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The banging comes first, followed by the screaming. I could try to blot out the noise and carry on, but proximity to family is supposed to be one of the benefits of working from home. My one-year-old son knows there’s a computer keyboard on the other side of the door that needs a merry bashing with his tiny fists. I relent, as always, steering him towards an old desktop rather than my work laptop. He soon tires, and toddles off in search of fresh excitement.
Like hundreds of other employees in Bloomberg’s Hong Kong bureau, I have been working from home for the past several weeks. How long exactly is hard to say, without checking. With no clear separation between the home and work, the hours and days blur into each other.
There’s a constant sense of extended hiatus. Like the residents of Casablanca, we are waiting, waiting for that plane (or subway, rather) out of here and back to the office.
For futurists, the business disruption wrought by the coronavirus is a dream come true. In 2014, a study by researchers at Stanford University challenged the notion that employees permitted to work from home might spend their time eating popcorn on the sofa and watching Netflix. On the contrary, they found that home
working led to a 13% performance increase, while employees who volunteered for the nine-month trial reported improved work satisfaction and their attrition rate halved. The company in that case study, perhaps prophetically, was Chinese: Ctrip (now known as Trip.com), a Shanghai-based and Nasdaq-listed travel agency then with 16,000 employees.
Now the global spread of the coronavirus offers a far larger and wider natural
experiment in the technical, logistical and human challenges of having large numbers of people work remotely. Companies from Twitter Inc and HSBC Holdings Plc to Dentsu Group Inc have advised, encouraged or required at least some staff to work from home. How well businesses function under these conditions could have a lasting impact on our approach to work.
The size of Hong Kong apartments compounds the physical and mental challenges. Working at home, I tend to move less than I would in the office, where the trip to the coffee machine or the meeting room requires a journey of at least a few hundred metres.
—Bloomberg
Matthew Brooker is an editor with Bloomberg Opinion. He previously was a columnist, editor and bureau chief for Bloomberg News. Before joining Bloomberg, he worked for the South China Morning Post.