Gates Package — page 1113

ad was that digitization would create more Of all the areas that are forever changed by the pandemic, I suspect that office work will see the most dramatic shift. The pandemic disrupted work in virtually every industry, but office workers were in the best position to take advantage of digital tools. The situation Smil describes--where you commute somewhere every day and work from a desk in an office-- sounds increasingly like a relic of the past, even though it was the norm for more than a century. As I write this at the end of 2021, many companies and workers are still figuring out what their "new normal" looks like. Some have already returned to full in-person work. Others have committed to being entirely remote. Most are somewhere in between, still trying to figure out what works best. I'm excited about the potential for experimentation. Expectations around traditional work have been upended. I see lots of opportunity to rethink things and find out what is effective and what isn't. Although most companies will likely opt for a hybrid approach in which people come into the office part of the week, there's a good deal of flexibility around what exactly that looks like. What days do you want everyone to be in the office for meetings? Do you let people work remotely on Mondays and Fridays, or do you let them stay home in the middle of the week? In order to minimize traffic, it would be best if every company in an area didn't pick the same days. One prediction I made in The Road Ahead was that digitization would create more choices about where to live and lead to many people moving further out of cities. It looked like this wasn't going to pan out--until the pandemic hit. Now, I am doubling down on that prediction. Some companies will decide that time in the office is only required one day a week or one week a month. This will allow employees to live farther away, since a long commute is easier to tolerate if you aren't doing it most days. Although we've seen some early signs of this