An Alternate Workspace

Gazing into the distance from my terrace, I can see the Jaipur I may have never seen from up here in all those vacations I spent at home during this decade of my adulthood. It’s ironic that this is the most chaotic situation that the world has ever been in, yet the naked eye sees the most peaceful ‘Pink City’. An explanation for this clean, fresh air that blankets the city needs no scientific analysis or statistic. The reason is obvious: the pandemic-forced full stop to traffic and industry.

I am not an extremist. I feel that the environmental carelessness of human growth was natural and that a woke society needs to right the wrongs done in the past. But not like this. Not at the mercy of a microscopic virus. Not at the cost of an overflowing morgue. I am fearful of the emergency brakes that have been put on our economy, abhor the complete isolation everyone of us has to live in and in nervous apprehension wait for the post-lockdown time. Yet, I can’t help but look at the silver lining of chirping birds, fresh air, and a clean Ganga. So, after twenty days of lockdown with another twenty in sight, I can’t simply go on lamenting. Let’s look at the future. Today, I saw an ad in our daily newspaper appealing its readers to come up with any ideas that can help us navigate this catastrophic Coronavirus situation. This motivated me to pen an idea I have held for some time now: Decentralized Working.

Let me systematically unravel what I mean by this phrase and why it is a viable alternative to the current office model of our companies and industries. Since the 90s, the world has shifted its workforce from largely manual labor to a growing legion of professionals who work on their computers. About 29% of Americans “can” work from home as per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Source). I am not familiar with such a statistic for India, but there are at least 3 million (Source) IT professionals in the country who can work from home. As the world stays home to stave the dangers of coronavirus, many of my friends, who are software developers, consultants, accountants, lawyers, and scientists continue to work; voraciously gulping down their Wi-Fi data. Can we continue on this path beyond the lockdown?

Maybe not to this extreme of completely staying home for work. As Prof. Raghuram Rajan mentioned in his recent interview with Prannoy Roy, we have started to appreciate the importance of human interaction as a basic need. Personally, I didn’t need the Coronavirus to make me realize this because I have spent the last 5 years doing my Ph.D., a painstakingly lonely and solo undertaking. Besides, there are logistical issues in India for a rapid transition to working from home. About 54% of HR leaders believe that poor internet infrastructure results in inefficient working conditions (Source). Another social study taken over a small dataset of about 10,000 individuals (Source) suggests that 99.8% of our workforce is inept for work-from-home culture. While reiterating the lack of social interaction, the study also attributes this inaptitude to poor communication skills, lack of individual drive, and inadequate personal management skills.

The solution of “Decentralized Working” that I am proposing here could be a mid-way of traditional office space and work-from-home model. It hinges on the idea of having multiple satellite offices within the city instead of a single main office that everyone rushes to at 9 a.m. in the morning. The retail sector like mobile stores, and banks, have always used this model by creating multiple outlets in the same city at key points. But with the proliferation of the Internet, this model need not stay just in the retail realm. The key distinction for other companies would be that instead of optimizing sales, they may choose to locate their offices strategically to optimize travel distances for its employees.

These offices can be made economical in a co-working model, where many companies identify city hotspots beneficial for their employees and are put together with another company with a similar location need. Existing infrastructure/buildings/campuses of many companies can be repurposed into these co-working nexuses as they themselves head into the decentralized model.

The social and economic benefits of decentralization can be manifold. At first, traffic congestion in downtown cities would decrease substantially. More employees will have reduced commute time associated with general well-being (Source) or can commute on foot associated with a healthier lifestyle (Source). The burden of providing conveyance to their employees will be greatly reduced on the companies. Moreover, since the growth of WeWork, Regus, and other co-working space startups, plenty of studies have touted the business benefits of this paradigm (Source).

Decentralized working is an amalgamation of traditional offices and working at home. The traditional concept of the office allows us to overcome several shortfalls of working-from-home such as lack of individual drive to work, personal management, and infrastructure capacity. However, the multiple office novelty of this concept introduces the challenge of communication skills already being observed during this lockdown. Teams may still need to coordinate across workspaces and Zoom/WebEx/GoTo Meetings will have to fill the void.

Coronavirus has already put us in a tough spot. The lockdown rules will only gradually wear off with partial relief from the curfew across a city. The transition can be made easy with this Decentralized model, which could simply be an investment to judge its efficacy for the future. Governments can actively encourage the adoption of this model especially in cities like Bengaluru, which has notoriously earned the title of the traffic-king of the world (Source). The government’s help with land acquisition for building such spaces, rebates to companies moving to this model, and push to advance infrastructure in such special localities, can systematize the chaotic urbanization of our cities.

I am not a city planner, not a businessman, and not a policymaker. As a concerned citizen, I just wish to see the clear skies of today across my city, state, and country till the day I am here and beyond!