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This is a download from BFM 89.9 for Business Station. BFM 89.9, the Business Station. My name is Rich Redberry and welcome to Matt's Blained. The bottom line is a topic that comes up frequently on BFM.
Profit and loss, earning calls, public policy, investments. Whether they're economical or social, we generally seek to maximize our gains. This has been a dilemma for many employers and employees over the past 12 months, as white color workers increasingly stay home and physically mix work with pleasure and the occasional dash of depression and desperation. Yes?
It's that time of the week where we look to our own little ray of Doom Shine, Culture Barps Matt Armitage. Matt, let's tackle that dilemma part first. Well, last year we talked about the acceleration of the work from home movement or rather the work from anywhere movement, which is probably a more accurate portrayal of where we're heading. At least it will be once we get a little more freedom of movement in that global sense.
We discussed that it was essentially uncharted territory, both for workers and bosses, especially for companies that have spent the last few years setting themselves up, basically as walled gardens, locking their information within their physical premises. Even if any servers that that information resided on was actually located thousands of kilometers away. It's something that I talked about on this show and I know it's something that you've covered on Bizbites and other shows on BFM have covered the various aspects of this whole kind of work from home movement over the last year. And one of the points that you made was that we eventually arrive at a codification of those behaviors.
Exactly that. We've had entire downtown districts closing down. For example, now this is anecdotal, a friend with a flat in Central London, Zone 1 has had trouble renting out over the last year because who wants to live in Central London during a pandemic where you're locked down and you can't go out. But that's a reversal of the last 20 years where demand has far out stripped supply.
So we've seen this massive behavioral and structural bomb go off in these Central Business Districts which of course has been devastating because we tend to think about these CBDs in terms of the big companies and the office space that they occupy. But there's that big picture. Yes, the millions of service workers who support those companies and the people who work in them. The office supply companies, the tech support companies, the cleaning staff, the convenience stores, the restaurants and the cafes that serve all of those workers food.
Then there are the bars and the clubs that entertain them after work. And of course, all those grab and go supermarkets and the shops and malls that allow people to commute for hours every day and still function however marginally as human beings. So thousands of people in every city contributing to an ecosystem that has allowed all of these big companies to flourish. And would you describe those support services as necessities or luxuries?
Well, they are necessities. I mean, if you look at the example of the big tech company campuses, they tend to recreate these city environment with CBDs within their walls, whether it's food or laundry, medical services, even sometimes down to elements like hair salons and massage therapies. But the majority of companies don't have the financial wherewithal to replicate the basic pillars of modern society in standalone locations. So they concentrate in areas that contain those services and connections.
They put up with escalating floor space costs as their side of that bargain with city planners and municipal governments. Now, obviously, that's a really simplistic overview, the story of how downtown districts have evolved is, you know, far more complex. And even before the pandemic, we had started to see the first signs of that contract, that social compact fracturing. In terms of work from anywhere policies.
Partly, you know, it was quite varied. It ranged from things like the introduction of smart casual rather than business wear at some stop-roaking firms, flexible working hours that allowed staff to come and go at different times and take care of kids and other family members, the occasional company that experimented with four-day working weeks. I think we even did a show on how countries like New Zealand were exploring that four-day week model before the pandemic. Yeah.
Strange how far away that world seems from us now. But as you said, you know, working from home and working from anywhere, although we were seeing that rise of a class of worker that was termed the digital nomad, remote working was often dealt with by companies on a case-by-case basis rather than as part of any company-wide policy. But even within companies, especially large companies with lots of premises and different sites, collaborative working was becoming a lot more commonplace as those companies embraced new productivity technologies and ability for those technologies to hold distributed teams together. That's roughly where we'd gotten up to in January of 2020 with predictions of this gradual decline of CBDs and the need to slowly reform and transform them.
Which is why you refer to the pandemic as a social bomb. Well, yeah, because it removed the lifeblood of those business districts overnight and of course that lifeblood is people. And that brings us back to that central dilemma that these are progressions that companies wanted to test and introduce slowly as we saw in the experimentation with things like the four-day working week. You might try it at one site or with one block of your team members, but you keep that center, that core of the business stable.
And that isn't a criticism because, you know, you wouldn't want to be the CEO sitting in front of the shareholders trying to explain why you were going to destroy a business model that has delivered years of dividends. So companies and their staff alike have been forced to adopt new working practices models that there was no planning for, that wasn't budgeted for, or wasn't even costed. And as is usual in these instances, because there's an obvious power imbalance, workers tend to give more ground than employers do. So this is essentially a work-life balance issue?
Well, it is. And it relates to that codification that I mentioned. So working from anywhere is actually working for a lot of companies. Like, people, teams are not proving to be less effective.
Or if they are less effective, they're acceptably less effective than in-person teams. In Japan last summer, Fujitsu announced that it was going to halve the amount of office space it possessed and allow employees to work from essentially wherever they wanted. Now, that's seismic because Japan is a country where long hours in the office are seen as part of that salaryman agreement, it's a way to impress bosses. So we've seen all sorts of companies announce that they will retain work from anywhere practices once the pandemic eases.
So tech companies like Twitter and Google, you might expect them to be part of this movement. I mean, I can guess the answer, but why? Well, on the one hand, the tech companies want to see progressive, hence the free childcare, the haircuts and all the other benefits on those sprawling campuses. Remote working is also arguably good for talent recruitment.
You don't have to pay new hires to uproot their current lives. You don't have to pay them salaries that will allow them to rent or buy in Silicon Valley or whatever high cost urban center that your company is housed in. You don't have the complicated process of obtaining visas for foreign talent hires. We're also seeing non tech firms older, more traditional companies that you might expect to be more conservative, also embracing these new tools.
And where does that leave the employees in terms of working conditions? Well, that's essentially the point. Companies are starting to codify these practices, but by and large, national governments have been preoccupied with propping up health systems, ensuring that the most vulnerable in society get financial assistance, ensuring credit and even bailout funds are available to businesses. And that's before you get to vaccine development or vaccine purchase, immunization programs, all of these aspects.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to allege that there's any nefarious conspiracy by companies to hold people hostage in their homes and make them work 24 seven. We all probably know at least one boss who's like that, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's company wide, that it's institutional. But we're seeing a slight change in people's responses to working from home in that the initial sense of freedom people felt that being in greater control of their time has given way to a sense that work is now intruding into every part of their lives. I think the quote that I read somewhere I think it was on the Guardian probably was from someone who said that it now just felt like they were sleeping in their office, that there was no respite, that there was no escape.
And in some cases, it's physically no means of escape because some places are still under strict lockdown conditions. So there are mental health implications. Yeah, and I'm sure that's something that BFM has covered quite extensively. And the full extent of that picture, of course, is still emerging and will be emerging for some time to come.
But that lack of oversight from governments makes it hard to know exactly what our rights are in this situation. So as I said at the start, we naturally try to make the most of our gains. So we reported last year that employees at some companies were finding that they could get their work done faster. And this was leading to an increase in free or leisure time.
And we mentioned that it was potentially going to lead to a new boom in startups. So it goes back to that thing that we talked about last year, the Board of Indents, people with the time to put their ideas into motion. Of course, I spent most of the year on the couch watching Netflix and eating crisps. I don't know if that counts as an idea.
No, it doesn't. Well, you know, that was always something that was going to be a short-term gain, weight gain, in my case. But there was always going to be a forensic accountant figuring out which staff could be doing more during their contracted hours. The ones working those fewer hours or getting away with working fewer hours are probably the lucky ones.
For the majority of home workers, I imagine they've been more likely to get a message from a boss or a colleague late at night or early in the morning requesting something urgently, whether it was needed or not, or simply, you know, that colleague flexing their muscles. To make you jump. Well, bosses always think that people on their team aren't doing enough, and that attitude can be particularly prevalent at the middle management level. At the Global CEO really doesn't care if the weekly marketing report from some far-flung office comes in on time, or if it was ever done in the first place.
But those are the drumbeats that dominate many of our lives, which is why I made that point about these intrusions on our personal time and space, not necessarily being institutional. We tend to think that whatever our boss is doing is part of some monolithic corporate plan. But oftentimes, that boss is simply, well, you know, a word on the radio. And that's why we start to hear, I think, these loud calls to have a legal right to disconnect, that there are parts of our lives that the people we work for can't intrude on.
OK, hold that thought. More on that right to disconnect after the break. You're tuned in to Matt Slain here on BFM 89.9. Behold freedom, Malaysia, BFM 89.9, the Business Station.
BFM 89.9, the Business Station. My name is Rich Bradbury. This is Matt Slain. Now, Matt, should we have the right to refuse work outside of our agreed hours, that is.
Now, we spoke about governments being preoccupied with the fallout of the pandemic, but are any countries championing the right to disconnect? All the Irish Republic is leading the way on this. As our Irish companies like AIB, Allied Irish Bank, which agreed to a right to disconnect policy in summer last year to protect workers, whether they're on their breaks or meal times, and protect their personal time and days off. The policy even makes it clear that email and messages don't need to be responded to immediately.
But at the start of this month, the Irish government went a step further. It published a right to disconnect code. And that code enshrines three key rights. You have the right not to have to routinely work outside of read working hours.
You have the right to face no penalty for refusing to work outside those hours. And there is a duty to respect someone else's right to disconnect, whether that be in terms of delivering work or responding, as I said, to email and messages. And I think those second and third rights are particularly important because they also offer protection from that harassment or pressure from immediate bosses and colleagues. It's kind of like having a step off clause written into your employment contract.
When we talk about code, are these provisions legally binding? It's not going to be a criminal offence to ask someone to send an email out of hours, workers will be entitled to take persistent violators to the Irish equivalent of workplace tribunals. So it's a guiding principle. It defines the limits of what should and shouldn't be deemed acceptable when people are working from home, at least in terms of guiding those expectations.
So it's likely that companies will quickly adopt these codes themselves to avoid any potential liability. But it also means that if you have one of those bosses that are that word we can't say or a colleague is pressuring you, then you have a case that you can take to the HR department. But we also have to remember that it's not just about the legal implications. Long media and the ease with which information can be spread also has a lot of companies working more proactively to protect their image and reputations.
So again, improving your life is good for their bottom line in numerous ways. So we see the idea spreading beyond Ireland? Well, the Canadian government is reportedly considering something similar and there is growing pressure for the UK government to act as well. And going back to that point about image and reputation, when MNCs adopt these more progressive policies, they're often adopted by those companies globally.
And that has knock on effects on local companies as well because they have to act to make employment with MNC as attractive as the multinationals. So I would expect the right to disconnect to snowball via this combination of corporate trend behaviour as well as through public policy enforcement actions as well as government start to open up and to look at the world without that COVID filter again. Now, as with most of these policies, they're good first steps. But are we doing enough to support and supply remote working population?
Well, certainly there are those aspects of urban renewal and the redeployment of assets and land in business districts. That's not something that I want to go into too deeply today. At that individual level, I think employees are going to need a lot more support. You know, when we scroll through Instagram feeds, we forget that not everyone lives in some immaculately interior design paradise.
You and I have discussed this before. You know, the field of view on our webcams for webinars and meetings is exactly that. It's a field of view that is as virtual as the meeting itself beyond what the camera can see back in the reality of our lives. It's just mess and chaos.
So if the home becomes the workplace, what responsibility do employers bear to make sure employees have the tools that they need? Typically, when we say that, we mean a laptop and software and, you know, yeah, I mean, usually it's quite limited. So should a company make sure, for example, that a member of staff has a proper desk to work from and not a tea tray balanced on the knee at the end of the bed? Hmm.
Who they cover or contribute to the utility bills for the electricity and heating or the cooling needs of that staff member? Do they provide secure internet connections? You know, let's not forget that the last year has been one of cyber intrusion. There was the story only last week of hackers purportedly stealing plans for forthcoming Apple devices from one of their partner manufacturers in, I think it was Taiwan.
And on the subject of Apple, a bit of a fast forward. Next week, we'll talk about the implications of Apple's new privacy and data tracking policies and that emerging power struggle between proponents of the so-called open and closed web. But back to that right to disconnect, you know, should employers address the issue of a worker's space itself? I was talking to a friend who works with a lot of developers and we were discussing the growth in home office conversions over the last year.
But that presupposes that you have the space not to mention the income to make that kind of conversion. What about people who are flat sharing or simply living in cramped conditions in low-cost housing? And so we're back to that tea tree desk on the end of the bed? Well, yeah, exactly.
You know, there is literally a balance there. Companies want to get the most out of their employees, but they're not going to be doing that if somebody is socially isolated and sitting at a makeshift desk in a bed set. But at the same time, what responsibility does that employer have in terms of providing adequate working space for a remote employee? If this is the shape of the future, then I think some kind of government intervention is going to be required because we need coherent public policies that will help us to map out this future of work.
And this brings me back to what was originally intended to be the focus of the other half of this show. And I guess now will be an elongated coder. No, I thought it was too optimistic to be the end of the episode. Well, yes, but if I stop now, you're going to have to produce some more content to fill in the gap.
So at this point, my nightmarish vision is probably the lowest hanging fruit for you. I imagine quite a few of our listeners will have watched the Black Mirror episode called 15 Million Merits, where people spend their lives peddling exercise bikes to earn sufficient social merits, essentially money to live. So what we've seen over the last 12 months is a sort of inversion of that, where people have struggled to get enough exercise. And unless we find ways to enshrine that, that right to disconnect, we may have to find other ways to stay fit.
So how do we do that? One way, of course, is medication, but that's a contentious method. I mean, would you take a pill that replaced exercise, something that kick-started your metabolism and caused your body to burn fat? I think if you don't ask me that question a year ago, I would probably say yes, but having spent a lot of time at home, I'm going to say no now.
Well, exactly. And I think that's a decision that a lot of people are facing, but some kind of version of that pill may well be with us in a few years' time. Various treatments are in different stages of developments and trials. These pills have been described as exercise mimetics, because they mimic the effects of exercise on the body.
One potential treatment or drug is a molecule known as Compound 14, which doesn't sound sinister at all, which was being developed at the University of Southampton in the UK. It was given to obese mice showing symptoms of diabetes, and after only a few days, the mice were losing weight, and their diabetes symptoms were reversing. A treatment currently being used for human diabetics called diometrics, called d'et formin, targets similar receptors, but often leads to weight gain rather than weight loss. So Compound 14 is yet to be tested on humans, but the researchers think it could work a bit like a master switch, so essentially rebooting and reprogramming the metabolism and triggering users to burn fat cells.
And this is just one of a number of treatments that are being explored around the world. Can we really replace exercise with a pill? Well, this is where the scientists themselves disagree a little bit. Exercise brings benefits to the entire body.
It stimulates your muscles and your organs. It stimulates your body to create new cells, so you can actually start to repair minor damage to those organs. Then, of course, there's the positive mental health aspect of exercise. I think one of the scientists in the new scientists piece that I read about this acknowledges that a pill will probably never deliver all the positive effects of, say, cycling around a lake, because the beneficial effects of that exercise are distributed around the body.
Drugs tend to be more targeted, so tests of some of the drugs and compounds have caused long-term side effects like reduced memory and impaired decision-making in some of the animals they've been tested on. Isn't the bigger issue an ethical one? Should we be taking a drug to keep us fit instead of actually keeping fit? Of course.
This is part of the wider discussion. Most of the researchers seem to think that their drugs, if successful, would act as a kind of kickstart mechanism. For example, to help someone who is extremely obese to lose enough weight to get to the point where they can actually exercise. They're essentially looking at them as being short-term mechanisms, but they think there is that potential for them to become as commonplace as drug-fired statins, because drugs typically have to cure or treat a specific disease or a cancer in order to be approved.
You don't get approval for general health drugs. The comparison with statins is that they would develop to treat heart disease. Over time, and through off-label prescribing, they become a defacto treatment for millions of people to prevent them developing heart disease. It's used as flipped.
It's gone from being a treatment to being a prevention. Even if we do end up in that world where we're locked away in tiny apartments working around the clock, we may at least have treatments, drugs, that will help us to stay fit and healthy. That's where you want to end today with a future where drugs allow us to endure endless work? Yes, that's a good place to stop.
No, I thought it was interesting to play the stories together. Ideally, in the long term, both will bring us benefits. If handled well, progressive work from anywhere policies could lead to improving that work on life balance. Similarly, metabolic booster drugs could allow us to stay fit and healthy longer.
It's something I see in my own life, jokes about Christmas-side. I have to be a lot more careful about what I eat. I try to eat sensibly. I try to eat healthily.
But I know my metabolism is slower. It's much harder to shed any weight that I do gain. In general terms, your stamina when it comes to exercise decreases as you age. This would be a way for people to stay fit and healthy for much longer.
That has economic consequences, not just positive health outcomes. We stay fit and healthier, and we cost health services less money. It allows us to enjoy that right to disconnect that we've also earned. And it benefits the nation's bottom line, and most of all, it benefits the line of my bottom.
Thanks very much for that. I actually set up the entire episode around that bun. Ladies and gents, you have been listening to Matt's Blaine, of course, here on BFM 89.9, the Business Station. Thank you for listening to this podcast.
To find more great interviews, go to BFM.my or find us on iTunes, BFM 89.9, the Business Station.