What Is Going to Happen?

For some reason, many believe the situation that prevailed before COVID-19 is going to prevail after COVID-19. It is not. Whether you consider it to be better or worse than the past is a subjective judgement. Everyone will have a view based on their business and life style. This is my opinion.

There are half-a-dozen people working in my company that will be influenced by my decisions, which are a function of what is happening in our environment, which is Lusaka. Most of them are working at home and two are living and working at the office, essential workers dictated by computing power or failsafe productivity. Everyone else is working from home where they suffer from 12-hour power outages everyday during which they cannot work. They work any hours that ZESCO gives them, including through the night.

I am older now, explicitly vulnerable to COVID-19 by age and diabetes, so I am not working nights; but remember being younger and happily working into the night. Especially for those with children, being at home must be a bonus; further, time is not wasted travelling to and from work. I can see many office workers preferring to work at home.

This is not so straight forward however: a professional company has an office as a matter of presence, prestige, a meeting place, and a place of work with reliable utilities. Not having an office is not an option for a professional company and working from home is not what professionals do. Sorry, but the definition of whether you are left at home or required in the office is a measure of status - freelance is not really a professional category and is a synonym for being somewhere between being employed and unemployed, underemployed.

What will happen though is a proportion of employees will be left at home to work, and that is going to have two outcomes: in the short term, less office space is required, resulting in a decline in office rents; and nobody is getting salary rises until there has been some movement towards normal. The combination means less demand for nearly everything other than food, internet, digital media. Let us hope. The world needs a sea change.