The Record - Issue 21: Summer 2021

88 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om S ince the pandemic outbreak over a year ago, countless organisations and individ- uals have discussed the ‘return to normal’: the return to our offices and workplaces, and the return to life as it was before Covid-19. But what we have learned over the last year is that nothing of this is trivial, and numerous terms have been coined to describe ‘the new normal’ or even ‘never normal’, where we need to anticipate constant change. Over the past few weeks and months, many large organisations have released their return- to-work policies, and they differ tremendously. Some ask all their employees to return to the office. Others allow their employees to work flex- ibly and spend one or more days at home, while a third major trend is to allow complete freedom in flexible working and spend as much time as one wants from the home office. Microsoft, for instance, released a very compre- hensive and informative guide on the company’s pandemic response and hybrid workplace for its employees. It focuses on three main areas: work site, workplace and work hours, describing the physical space, geographic location, and days of work for any individual. Microsoft describes the hybrid workplace as being built on a commitment to flexibility that welcomes diverse workstyles, relies on learning and mindset shifts, considers business and individual needs, and is built on trust and technology. It can be argued that no organisation has managed the hybrid workplace transition better than Microsoft, enabling all its employees to work flexibly in every respect, pow- ered to a large extent by Microsoft Teams. Of course, most other non-service-based organ- isations have also coped exceptionally well with enabling flexible work. This is why strict return- to-the-office directives are often challenging to understand and make little sense. One would think that happy, healthy, safe, and productive workers would be more critical to business suc- cess than the requirement to be in the office. And here we are at a cornerstone of return-to- work policies and requirements. Fisher Philips, one of the largest US law firms in the areas of labour, employment, civil rights, employee ben- efits, and immigration law, maintains a Covid- 19 Employment Litigation Tracker and Insights dashboard that shows cases that were a direct result of the Covid-19 pandemic and are tradi- tional employee versus employer cases. By June 2021, the dashboard held information on more than 2,600 cases, and the most common case type was ‘Remote Work/Leave conflicts’. These conflicts exist because the employer did not suf- ficiently enable or allow employees to work from home to stay safe and healthy. Once worldwide government waivers and recommendations to work from home end, it will be the employer’s responsibility to com- pensate for the loss of life or any other chronic The future is unknown It is difficult to predict how people will work in the ‘new normal’ but it’s likely that remote working and the tools – like Microsoft Teams – that facilitate it will become increasingly essential ANDE R S LØK K E : P E X I P V I EWPO I NT “Microsoft Teams will continue to be the remote workers’ primary tool”