Unintended consequences can be powerful things. As governments have locked down their economies to curb the Covid-19 pandemic, they have unwittingly imposed crash courses in communications technology on entire populations.
Information-intensive services from education and administration, to banking, journalism and even government have replaced face-to-face meetings by video conferencing. So have yoga classes, concerts and medical consultations. The collective jump from “in real life” to online contact is not limited to business activities. From isolated grandparents to primary school students, families have been forced to learn the techniques of remote communication tools en masse.
This means that the Great Lockdown has willy-nilly brought with it the digital era’s equivalent of a rapid mass literacy programme, this time in how to use IT. If we are to glimpse any silver lining in the current collapse in output, this human capital windfall is one.
The greatest promise of more widespread competence in information and communications technology is that it can help broaden knowledge of the most productive business practices. For years, it has been clear that the slowdown in productivity growth in rich societies was less a problem of stagnation in leading businesses than the lack of take-up of best practice by companies lagging behind this leading group. If increased ICT use can repair what the OECD has called the broken “productivity diffusion machine”, then something good may come out of the severe shutdown.
Remote working by itself has sometimes been found to boost productivity, by making it cheaper to scale up geographically and reducing the time and stress of required travel.
But there is also a downside risk if the shift from physical to online interaction persists beyond the lockdown’s end. Not all work is more efficiently done from home, nor are all workers as productive, fulfilled or motivated at a distance, let alone blessed with good working conditions at home. Studies suggest businesses can get the most out of remote work practices by giving workers the flexibility to mix in-office and distance interaction.
Above all, the best ideas — those that really push a business or the economy’s productivity forward — are often the spontaneous outcome of unplanned, face-to-face mingling. This is also why cities are cauldrons of innovation and creativity, and hence productivity, especially in economies that rely ever more on knowledge rather than on mechanical production.
What will matter is to balance face-to-face creativity and the benefits of remote working. We want both the mingling that breeds innovation and the widest possible take-up of that innovation. Businesses and countries need to encourage experimentation with new work and organisation models, in order to find this golden middle. For corporate and policymaking leaders, now is not too soon to think about how to achieve the correct balance as we slowly start to lift the constraints on physical interaction.
Many service jobs will always have to be done in person. But higher productivity elsewhere in the economy creates the resources to reward those jobs better, too. In the long term, it is hard to see how greater digital and ICT literacy will not bear fruit. When literacy became widespread in the 19th century, letter-writing in part replaced face-to-face contact. But this loss was far exceeded by the benefits of remote communication. The era of video conferencing that has been thrust upon us holds similar promise.
