On September 20, 1994, some 32,000 AT&T employees stayed home. They weren’t sick or on strike. They were telecommuting. Employees ranging from the CEO to phone operators were part of an experiment that involved 100,000 people. The purpose? To explore how far a vast organization could go in transforming the workplace by moving the work to the worker instead of the worker to work7.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted every facet of our society, many employers had implemented flexible working policies. While estimates vary8 the consensus is that over the next three years between 25-50% of the workforce will be working flexibly. This trend is not only fuelled by the pandemic, but studies have shown that working remotely is proven to:
- Increase productivity and morale
- Attract and maintain winning talent
- Provide significant cost savings
According to a Stanford University study, offering remote work options reduced employee turnover, and job attrition rates fell by over 50%. As many as 82% of professionals said they would be more loyal to their employers if they had flexible working policies.9 Covid-19 has only accelerated the rate of change rather than being a catalyst for the change itself.
The employees that can work from home generally fall into the category of “knowledge workers”. These employees are middle to upper income families. The “new normal” as many companies have described it means that employees will either work from home full time, or a hybrid of office and home work. The latter is what the consensus holds to be the future, an environment where knowledge workers can collaborate, hold key meetings, and do creative work at the office and then focus on productive work from the comfort of home.
The new normal has led to increased investment in home offices, spaces for children to play at home, home exercise and increasing connectivity in the home to cater for these new needs. These knowledge workers are exploring new areas away from the city centre, and investing in larger, often more affordable, homes further from suburban centres as they can now work remotely.
THE NEW NORMAL
Previously, it was not feasible to have a child study from home as dual income households meant that there was nobody to safeguard the child. With families working from home, the added safety and convenience of having their children at home has been mitigated by the time needed to keep them educated and entertained.
Online education should ideally provide the perfect solution to this predicament. With a full day of contact time and an immersive calendar for learners, parents should be able to focus on work while comforted that their child is not only safe under their own roof but being well educated. This also means less travel time for parents who traditionally would have spent 1-2 hours a day in traffic to and from schools. When adding the lower cost of education, going online has never been as attractive.
Traditional online education was designed in a way that made the parent the teacher. This model does not allow the parent the full benefit of working from home. A new solution is needed. A solution that is teacher led and ensures that a child is fully immersed and educated while parents work from home.
The added flexibility of being able to study remotely means that parents can take jobs in new cities or even countries, go on a trip, book a holiday while at the same time the learner is unaffected as they need not even change a class or say goodbye to classmates.
The question then is not if digital education could be a strong solution for families living in “The New Normal”, it is how digital education evolves to allow families and learners to benefit together?
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