18 months later: post-pandemic planning in the public and private sectors

From more working from home to office closures and new technologies, coronavirus has changed everything, but IT leaders are confident they'll get through

A quick scan of recent headlines offers an instructive summary of how attitudes to the workplace work are changing as a result of the pandemic. Here's one from HR Director: 60 per cent want to work at home after Covid-19.

As well as 60 per cent saying they would like to work from home more often, 53 per cent say they don't want to return to a normal office once the pandemic has subsided. The government may be urging people to return to the workplace, but many employees really don't miss the daily commute at all. They appreciate the additional flexibility that homeworking offers and find it easier to concentrate in the quiet of their own space.

Remote working was already making steady progress, but the pandemic has put a rocket under that trend and it's hard to see things going back to the way they were, however much some managers would like that. Some companies such as Twitter have already said they are willing to allow employees to work from home full time if they want to.

Increased remote working will have a number of far-reaching knock-on effects, from reduced office space requirements to changes in childcare arrangements and revised train timetables. It's likely that fewer people will choose to squeeze into crowded cities and perhaps small towns will see a renaissance. The traditional 9 to 5, already in decline, may be about to clock out for the last time.

But that's all for the future. First, we have to get through the next 18 months.

Economic gloom

Discussions around remote working are taking place in the context of both the health impact of the virus (which, let's not forget, has only infected a small portion of the population as yet) and also the wider economic picture. The business pages tell their own tales, and these stories are almost universally gloomy. For example: Coronavirus: UK councils fear bankruptcy amid Covid-19 costs (BBC), UK on brink of insolvency due to devastation of coronavirus admits Bank of England (Express); and UK economy hit by worst contraction for 41 years (BBC).

Some writers are more optimistic, mentioning the possibility of a V-shaped recovery, or finding hope in the opportunity to kickstart new types of green business, but in both the private and public sectors there's no doubt that these are very tough times indeed.

Ahead of Computing's Deskflix: Public Sector event, we wanted to find out whether the picture differed from the points of view of public and private sector organisations. We asked 270 IT leaders, one-third from the public sector, to tell us how they view the current situation. On the public sector side 43 per cent were working in education, 18 per cent in local government and 12 per cent in health, while the private sector employees were fairly evenly split across multiple sectors, the largest being finance, manufacturing and technology. Organisations ranged in size from 50 employees to tens of thousands.

Base: 270 IT leaders, 90 public sector, 180 private sector.

Despite the pervasive gloom, our respondents were mostly pretty sanguine about their organisations' futures. Sixty per cent in the public sector and 44 per cent in the private sector said they were "very confident" that their business will continue to operate in 18 months' time more or less as it does today. Only a handful said they were not confident. These included a private college worried about the non-arrival of fee-paying overseas students, property management firms and a number of smaller consultancies and financial companies. In the public sector, the most worried respondents were found in national or local government, fearful of cutbacks from central authorities.

Office shrinkage

Here's another headline - British employers mull smaller offices post-Covid (Reuters). A survey in June found that roughly half of UK's employers are planning to reduce office space and stagger return to work as restrictions ease. In support of this finding, 87 per cent of employees said they would like more opportunities to work from home post-return, with 21 per cent wanting to work from home permanently.

Among our respondents, exactly half of those in the public sector and 54 per cent in the private sector said office space will be scaled back, with the average reduction in space estimated at around 20 per cent in the public and 22 per cent in the private sector.

The vast majority of those who didn't anticipate a decrease thought that office space would remain at current levels; very few believed premises would expand. No wonder those in property management are feeling a little queasy.

Homeworking, shifts and rotas

In line with the above headlines, our respondents overwhelmingly predicted a future defined by remote working, with almost a third in both public and private sectors saying there will be "much more" working from home (WFH) at their organisation 18 months from now.

In terms of roles, a massive 93 per cent of our public sector respondents and 90 per cent in the private sector said IT professionals would spend more time off site. Home-loving marketing and communications and finance folks are in luck too: more than 80 per cent in both public and private sectors said there'd be more WFH in these and other typically office-based roles, and even in traditionally people-facing roles like sales.

Delivery driving from home would be a nice job if you can get it, but we'll have to wait on Mr Musk for that one. Until then driving - like many other jobs - will continue as normal. Changes to other roles are more nuanced. The last few months have been a testbed for teaching remotely, with, it's probably fair to say, mixed results. While some children have managed to keep up with their work online, many have definitely suffered from the lack of a physical presence, and online lessons, while a useful stopgap, are not a replacement. With healthcare the picture is similar. Routine consultations are now being carried out over video link and this is likely to continue, but of course there's no way that most medical procedures can be carried out remotely.

In some workplaces, shift work or rota systems have been introduced to reduce pressure on facilities, and as people start to return to their workplaces we'll see a lot more of those types of arrangements in coming weeks.

Making workplaces safe

Here are the main physical measures our respondents are taking to Covid-proof their facilities to keep employees safe.

Almost all the measures were more frequently mentioned by respondents in the private sector.

Prospects good - for IT at least

The job situation is certainly looking pretty grim, particularly for young people, and there's a real danger of a return to a 1980s style period of long-term unemployment for sections of society.

But at a time when many are fearing job losses, IT is an exception. Most organisations know that technology has a key role to play in the post-Covid future and are hanging onto their IT staff. Very few of those we interviewed said the axe will fall on IT. In fact, 44 per cent of respondents in the public sector and 28 per cent in the private sector said they were currently hiring IT roles.

IT support was the most sought after role in both public and private sectors, followed by back end engineers, front end developers and DevOps specialists. There was a bit of a split between public and private after that, with the private sector much more likely to be looking at security professionals, Agile specialists, data scientists and cloud specialists than the public sector, perhaps seeing these roles as key to getting ahead competitively as things reopen, an imperative that's not quite so urgent in the public sector.

Farewell hotdesking?

Love it or hate it, hotdesking has long been an effective way for companies to do more with less office space. However, hygiene considerations mean that its immediate future is uncertain. Certainly, in the short-term desk sharing is a no-no. There have been anecdotal stories about companies downsizing their peripherals as the downsize their offices, too, with printers in particular in the firing line, but our survey didn't find this. The pandemic could spell curtains for the humble desk phone, however.

Meanwhile, organisations have been snapping up laptops like there's no tomorrow and company smartphones have been high on the shopping list too. And it will come as no surprise to learn that collaboration and remote access software has been flying out of the download stores.

With employees using their own home printers and bandwidth are organisations stepping up to help with the cost? For more than 90 percent in both public and private sector the answer is no, but this will surely become an issue if, as predicted, many more of us are working from home much more frequently.

So this is what disruption looks like

Over the years we've all become accustomed to the concept of disruption. We've carefully adjusted our business models, going digital and trying to become more agile and adaptable, but few had in mind the sort of upheaval we're going through now.

Globally the pandemic is gathering pace and there is more disruption to come. In the long term many private sector businesses face an uncertain future and public sector organisations can expect budgets to be pared back even further.

However, maybe because change is in technologists' DNA, despite the bleak headlines our respondents revealed a streak of optimism in this study, a feeling that despite the challenges their organisations will find a way through, and that they would be instrumental in that process.