DI SPATC H E S| COVID-19
Five gains COVID has conferred The pandemic has been devastating in many ways, but there have been some silver linings. By Laura Neilson Bonikowsky
O
n Ma rc h 11, 2020, t he World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Since then, we’ve endured lockdowns, restrictions, fear-mongering and business failures. Approximately 140 million people worldwide have had COVID and more than 3 million have died from it. While it may seem unlikely that anything good could come from the pandemic, there are changes to celebrate. 44
Work flexibility
The obvious change is the way many of us work; Statistics Canada reports that nearly 5 million people are working from home who don’t usually. Roughly 10 million private-sector Americans work from home, double pre-pandemic numbers, excluding the country’s 3 million federal civilian employees, according to the National Compensation Survey. We've been freed from commuting
and cubicles to work, instead, against the background of home life. It’s mostly been successful, with businesses taking advantage of technology that allows colleagues to see each other and share documents. Some organizations find the arrangement successful enough that they are making it permanent. Some have gone further; the Conference Board of Canada, after sending its staff home to work in March 2020, announced in July it would sell its SPRING 2021 | APR-MAY-JUN
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Working from home — a technological possibility for some time, but one employers were slow to adopt — became a necessity because of the pandemic. It's likely many workplaces will allow and even encourage it to continue.
