How cities might change if we worked from home more

June 1, 2020

For many of us, our homes have become our workplaces over the past few months, and a full return to the office still appears a remote prospect.

Major tech companies say they are open to their staff working from home permanently. Employees are coming to realise remote working is not only possible but, in some cases, preferable. A shift to a new way of working might already be under way.

Such a shift could have profound implications on our home life, and by extension on the life of our towns and cities: almost a quarter of all office space in England and Wales is in central London alone.

To understand those implications, we brought together four experts on city life, all of whom were working from home.

Will city centres empty out?

Paul Cheshire, professor of economic geography, London School of Economics:

I do think we’ll go back to offices but not in the same way.

People are more productive when they are closer together with face-to-face contact. There’s 20 years of really good persuasive research demonstrating how important that is. There are lots of things you cannot do except with other people – people are innately social animals.

Les Back, professor of sociology, Goldsmiths:

I do think we are at a tipping point. There’s a reorientation, a recalibration of the relationship between place and time and social life that we’re on the cusp of. We may see profound changes. Some things may not come back.

Aude Bicquelet-Lock, deputy head of policy and research, Royal Town Planning Institute:

It’s true some companies have said that they could allow their workforce to work from home forever. Twitter said it. Facebook said it. The CEO of Barclays said that putting 7,000 people in the office might be a thing of the past.

The experience of going to the office in Aberystwyth isn’t the same as going to the office in London. The decline of office space will affect small, medium and large cities in different ways.

Les Back:

The hollowing-out of city life has been coming for a long time. It may be that what will happen is that some businesses won’t come back to the centre of the city and think it’s too risky – or there may be other economic drivers where people will just take the opportunity to ask: “Why are we investing so much of our capital in these large office spaces?”

I think there are possibly huge effects [of more working from home]. There’s the pressure on the domestic sphere. There’s the pressure on gendered relationships at home, on the blurring and overlaying of parenting and work and the pressures that would cause.

Aude Bicquelet-Lock:

I think what we will see is that local centres may see more diversification – more dining, more social activities as people may want to meet each other. Also working from home may mean getting access to workplaces in local towns for some days. Growth is to be expected in these areas.

The contrary could apply to bigger cities, which of course raises the question of how the office space could be reused: there are several options, like turning offices into residential spaces, which hasn’t always been done with absolute success.

I also wonder whether we will need conference halls and other meeting spaces as we did in the past.

Paul Cheshire:

You will get more people working from home, which will mean there will be more demand for large houses. You have to have a workspace, which will push you out. You may need to move to commute maybe once a week, twice a week to your headquarters, wherever that is, for meetings. Therefore you’ll accept a longer commute for cheaper space. You’ll tend to move further away from the city centre.

On the other hand, there will be people who have to stay in the offices, stay in the concentration, the social interaction, who will become even more strongly attracted to the city centre. But you will probably also get localised desk-sharing, specialised areas where people can go if you’re a homeworker, where you can occasionally get better IT or better facilities or get away from your children. There will be an opening-up in smaller towns of hot-desking spaces.

We will need more space. What you would be doing is opening land close to stations with good access to city centres. You could build a million houses on green belt land within 45 minutes of central London because there’s so much green belt land.

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The fastest-growing places for people commuting to London are incredibly far away – Peterborough, York, Somerset. People are living miles out in order to get affordable land and more space. That will be accelerated. And it will be particularly accelerated unless we are willing to release land close to transport nodes that will give access to jobs.

What about transport and the environment?

Margaret Bell, professor of transport and the environment, University of Newcastle:

Our research has shown that in a study of commuting to Newcastle the 7% of trips over 50km were responsible for 60% of the carbon emissions. The further you travel, the more detrimental effect with emissions.

Paul Cheshire:

That’s one of the ironies of the green belt: forcing people to commute further.

Margaret Bell:

My worry is people buying more cars and those who have cars will use them more. What we do need is incentives to use bicycles more and to get people to shift towards living closer to their work or workplaces, or arranging for people to go to work more locally.

We need a bottom-up approach to understand people’s needs and try and tailor the transport accordingly.

Paul Cheshire:

Housing, particularly in England, is very energy inefficient. There’s quite a big carbon footprint with more time spent in the home because home heating and home insulation is far, far worse than modern commercial premises are.

Margaret Bell:

Some work we did in Leicester showed that if you work from home, on average you use 75% more energy than you save by not going into work. And that corresponds to a 75% increase in carbon dioxide – purely and simply because if you need heating and gas, electricity at home, that’s more than what you save by not going into work by car.

And so, coupled with the isolation effect, it’s sensible for local businesses to open up their hot-desking offices, or even have reciprocal arrangements with companies where consultants working more out of town could reciprocate hot-desking in offices.

What about the way we use cities?

Les Back:

We are predominantly talking about people who work in finance service sectors, white-collar jobs and white-collar workers. That isn’t the workforce of cities. What about hospital, school and other public sector jobs?

Also, cities are important because they’re places of encounter. Places of difference. That difference and the negotiations that happen across racial and cultural difference take on particular qualities in the centre of cities that are not the same in the outskirts and in the suburbs.

Aude Bicquelet-Lock:

Everyone will have gone through the lockdown and will have gone through the changes and had new habits and will have strong views about what it is they want, what works for them and what doesn’t.

And I think one of the first things we will have to do as urban planners and policymakers is listen to what they want. But there will be financial constraints.

Paul Cheshire:

The other issue is people’s fear: how long will it take people to recover from the experience of being worried about being in crowds, being vulnerable. I think people will recover from that if there is a vaccine, if the virus subsides.

If that happens, offices will reassert themselves and all those things we liked doing in city centres will also reassert themselves. That may take quite a long time.

How to work from home comfortably

May 11, 2020

Not everyone has home offices. But there are still ways to help your body avoid strain with these expert ergonomics tips.

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“You can’t be productive when you’re in pain.”

That’s what Susan Hallbeck says – she’s a doctor and the president of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. Ergonomics is the study of how humans interact with the physical systems in their environment: how, for example, we sit at our desks for eight hours a day at work. And how if we don’t do it correctly, it can lead to physical problems and pain.

Now that we’re in the thick of the global Covid-19 pandemic, with hundreds of millions of people abruptly forced to work from home, it’s an urgent topic. Many of us are finding ourselves hunched over laptops on sofas or beds, perched on hard dining room chairs or subjecting our arms and wrists to ill-placed keyboards. For most of us, gone are the days when well-designed offices took care of all these problems for us.

So as we wash our hands and stay isolated to repel the coronavirus, how can we make sure we’re not subjecting our bodies to a different hazard caused by bad work-from-home habits? Here are the top ergonomic tips for working from home, whether it’s during a pandemic or not.

Treat your home like an office

Good ergonomic habits take practice no matter the setting, but it’s especially hard in this current situation. Perhaps, at first, your office said staff would be working remotely for a week or two, so you simply grabbed your laptop and left. That might’ve been okay for a little while – but at this point you might be asking yourself, “it’s been a month and a half, and my elbow is really starting to hurt”, says Hallbeck. “What’s up with that?”

The Covid-19 pandemic has had many of us abruptly working from home, even if we don’t have a home office or additional tech equipment (Credit: Getty Images)

It’s because we’re not in an office setting, which is much more likely to have the ergonomic bases covered: a computer monitor that’s at or slightly below eye level and an arm’s length away, a chair that supports your lower back and access to a mouse, which is better for your wrist than a trackpad. That’s one of the challenges we face with the pandemic, Hallbeck says. “People really didn’t think they were going to be gone for so long.”

But there are improvements you can make; if you didn’t have a bespoke home office pre-Covid, take the time to invest in accessories: a mouse, a good office chair and a standalone keyboard or monitor. If you can’t afford all those extra electronics, items lying around your house can help. If you have a standalone keyboard, for example, you can use a stack of books to raise your laptop to the right height, with the keyboard below it.

You can’t be productive when you’re in pain – Susan Hallbeck

“The critical issue is to separate the keyboard from the monitor so you can get your monitor at the right line of sight: eye level or slightly below. Then adjust your keyboard or input device so that your elbow angle is around 90 degrees,” says Hallbeck, to provide proper forearm support and keep your wrists in a neutral posture.

The point here, and with all ergonomics, is to avoid what Hallbeck calls “microtraumas”: the tiny strains we put on our joints and muscles that may be invisible now, but will come back to bite us later with long-term ailments like muscular and skeletal disorders: carpal tunnel syndrome, inflamed tendons, muscle strains or finger, shoulder and back injuries.

The goal is to replicate the best ergonomics setup possible, even if you’re working from home away from the office (Credit: Mayo Clinic)

Prepare for good posture

One issue at the moment is that many of us may be sitting at the kitchen or dining room table as we take Zoom calls or draft emails. The problem here? Dining room tables may well be the same height as office desks, but dining room chairs often sit lower than office chairs, plus you can’t adjust the height – bad news for your forearms against those hard table edges. Hallbeck says just take a small towel or washcloth “and double it up under your arms so you don’t have that pressure point”.

And if you’re sitting in one of those hard wooden chairs, Hallbeck recommends sticking a small pillow behind you at your waist to provide easy lumbar support. Make sure your back is against the chair, shoulders relaxed, and arms relaxed at 90-degree angles. “Let your furniture do the work,” Hallbeck says.

Posture is key, adds Kirsty Angerer, an ergonomics consultant based in Leicester, England, who says something called “neutral posture” should be our goal.

Aim for “a position of ease for the body to maintain for a prolonged period of time – where the position supports the natural curves of the spine” – Kirsty Angerer

“This is a position of ease for the body to maintain for a prolonged period of time – where the position supports the natural curves of the spine and maintains your body in good alignment,” she says. “A position for the body that you can sustain with minimal effort and [that] gives you biomechanical advantages to do your work.

“When you have set yourself up appropriately in your chair put your hands in your lap comfortably. Where your elbow lands is the same height that you want your table top to be. To check, sit side on to your table; if you have to lift your arm to reach the table top you are too low. You should be able to slide your arm over the table without lifting your shoulder up.”

Make sure to move – including your eyes

It’s not just about your position while you sit, however. Since you’re not in an office, there’s no more walking to the printer or over to talk to a colleague, or popping down the street for lunch.

“Due to everything we need being in much closer proximity, we will naturally be moving less than when we were in the office: it’s now only a few steps to the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room and the bedroom,” says Angerer.

Non-exercise activity thermogenesis – or Neat – refers to those tiny ways we expend energy that don’t fall into the categories of sleeping, eating or sports; think things like walking around an office or even fidgeting or tapping your toes. Studies show that Neat could play a key part in maintaining our energy levels and body weight. In the new work-from-home environment, that means consciously tapping into these activities and making sure to move every 30 minutes – outside is great, but even a different room is suitable. The main goal is that you’re moving intermittently and varying your posture throughout the day to avoid strain.

Don’t forget your eyes, Angerer adds. “Our eyes are a muscle, so they need to move regularly as well,” she says. Every 20 minutes, take your eyes off your screen and focus on something 20ft away for 20 seconds, something which helps avoid eye strain.

And lighting plays a role, too. If it’s too bright in the room, it may speed up eye strain or give you headaches. If it’s too dull, you may end up in an awkward position as you try to read your screen. “You should have less light above the eyes and more light below the eyes – on the table, across the keyboard and documents,” she says. Avoid sitting right next to a window, which may cause a glare on the computer screen.

Of course, for those locked down in tiny flats or sharing space with roommates, creating a full home office will not be realistic – in fact many people will be working on sofas or on their beds. Hallbeck says that on a bed, use pillows to support your lower back, place a pillow under your thigh[s] to reduce pressure on your lower back, create a tray to put your laptop on, put your monitor slightly below eye level and keep elbow angles at 90 degrees. But ideally, you should really be sitting at a table or desk: “If you can avoid the bed or couch, avoid it,” she says.

Pay attention for pain

The basic idea with these tips is to take small steps to protect your body. It depends on the person, but bad habits in your twenties may not cause real problems until your fifties. Everyone’s body is different, which is why you need to be as conscientious as possible. And if you feel pain, take that as a signal: something clearly isn’t working. “People should pay attention to their bodies,” Hallbeck says.

One of the lasting effects of Covid-19 could be that more companies will allow people to work from home in the future. So being mindful of WFH ergonomics could end up being a skill we’ll use permanently.

“I think companies are going to re-assess what can and can’t be done from home – office space is expensive. I think that’s going to be something that comes out of this pandemic,” Hallbeck says. “A reassessment of what it means to work from home… and what a home office looks like. People are going to have to learn how to set up their ergonomic settings themselves.”

Source: BBC

Facebook and Google extend working from home to end of year

May 8, 2020

Facebook and Google have said they will let employees continue working from home for the rest of the year.

The tech giants have announced plans to reopen their offices soon but are allowing more home working flexibility.

Google originally said it would keep its work from home policy until 1 June, but is extending it for seven more months.

Facebook said it would reopen its offices on 6 July as coronavirus lockdowns are gradually lifted.

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said that employees who need to return to the office will start being able to do so from July with enhanced safety measures in place.

But the majority of employees who can carry out their jobs from home will be able to do so until the end of the year, Mr Pichai added.

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The announcement coincides with Facebook’s as more companies start rolling out their back-to-work strategies.

“Facebook has taken the next step in its return to work philosophy. Today, we announced anyone who can do their work remotely can choose to do so through the end of the year,” a spokesman said. “As you can imagine this is an evolving situation as employees and their families make important decisions re: return to work.”

Facebook is still determining which employees will be asked to come in, the spokeswoman added.

The social media platform was among the first tech firms to ask its employees to begin working remotely. Facebook gave employees $1,000 (£807) bonuses for their work-from-home and childcare costs.

The trend for working from home may suit some companies while they redesign their office spaces to cater to new social distancing guidelines. Some employees are nervous about returning to work in the middle of a global pandemic.