Ending the year 2019 and coming into the year 2020, everyone around the world had high hopes for the new year. But the year came with its peculiar situation, COVID 19! No one thought the world would change rapidly the way it does in year 2020. Covid came and shut down almost everything. The origin was traced to a city in China and it took no time before it spread rapidly around the world. What covid eventually did was more than bringing a disease but also changed the way we do things and that has remained with us till today.
The death toll around the world due to covid was about 6.8million according to the World Health Organisation. That was massive and no one expected this type of fatality when the disease broke up. In order to prevent the rapid spread around the world, various government took various steps to contain the spread. The major containment was to impose a lockdown on the country. Nigeria was also not an exception to this lockdown. Due to lockdown, movements were highly restricted to only essential services. But just like we usually say in the local parlance “life must go on”, we have to devise a means to remain active and ensure that activities do not grind to a complete halt.
Organisation and business offices introduced a work from home model. We thought this cannot be possible in our lifetime but it does. Every worker had to reorganise their homes to create a mini office and workspaces. With covid comes very innovative meeting tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and so on. We practically moved our offices online! People were able to communicate, assign task to subordinate and carry out assigned task while also contributing to the development of the organisation despite that fact that we could not meet in out typical brick and wood offices.
After the relaxation of the lockdown, life has not remained the same again. For example, my organisation has found it extremely difficult to go back to the physical mode of work again. As a matter of fact, there has been growing cases where prospective employees will want a work from home condition to be part of employment contract. Organisation has lost good hands due to the fact that some cannot provide a work from home option due to the nature of their work. Companies have also been trying to be innovative about work from home, some have introduced the hybrid option. This simply means that employees will report physically to the office for a specific number of days while working from home on some other days.
The effect of covid also brought with it some advantages, chief of which is that it has assisted to reduce travel time. Gone are those days where we have to travel several miles to attend trainings and conferences, but with covid and the advent of various meeting tools, we can now sit in the comfort of our offices or homes and attend trainings, conferences or even meetings miles away. Though some people do not like this because it has denied them of the extra cash they usually make from estacode and per diems.
A very important aspect of the work from home that we need to watch out for is the psychological effect of loneliness. This has brough new diseases to the society and we have seen employees who may not be able to integrate back into the work space due to long period of deliberate solitary confinement. There is the need to balance work from home with the psychological effect of being locked up in one’s room from morning tonight due to the fact that there are tasks to be performed while working from home.
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