This week marks the first anniversary of Fortune’s decision to ask all U.S.- and Europe-based staffers to work from home. Looking back on the email announcement is like looking at a time capsule. There was a strong focus on cleaning and sanitization, which we now know isn’t a good use of time and resources in fighting the battle against COVID-19. Business travel was canceled. Training sessions on working from home were offered. But most notable is that initially the office shutdown was scheduled for just one week: “We will reevaluate the need to extend this temporary policy next week and will communicate updates accordingly.”
I haven’t been back in the office since.
The past year has transformed nearly every aspect of our world. Seemingly overnight, the quirky (wearing leggings during a Zoom call with clients!) became mundane. Meanwhile, our friends, family, colleagues, and communities have had their lives changed in critical ways that promise to have much longer-lasting effects. Living through a global pandemic has driven dramatic shifts in our jobs, eating habits, childcare, and even our collective sense of time.
Fifteen Fortune staffers reported on some of the most significant ways in which our lives have been altered, and one lesson rings true: Virtually no one has been left untouched after 12 months of such dramatic disruption. A generous dose of empathy and understanding of that truth will make us all stronger as we rebuild and remake our world in the year ahead.
In a year of Zoom burnout, mask profiteering, and virtual yoga, perhaps no COVID-19 phenomenon will have a more lasting impact than WFH, or work from home. The pandemic drove companies worldwide to shut their offices, sometimes at a day’s notice. By June of last year, 42% of the U.S. labor force, largely from the ranks of white-collar employees and professionals, were working from home, many shutting their apartments and logging in from cheaper or more serene locations. Similar retreats to home offices happened around the world.
For a while it seemed like a respite from daily stresses. Traffic jams vanished in cities like Los Angeles, San Jose, and Bengaluru. Companies reported saving countless millions on utilities and operating costs, and started eyeing their high-priced offices as unnecessary, since their businesses seemed to tick along fine without them.
Now, a year on, it seems possible that office life might never be the same again. For millions, working from home has come to signify higher-end employment. Indeed, the gulf is now starkly visible on the streets between those able to perform their jobs remotely, and lower-paid transport, health, or retail workers who have no WFH option. With offices shut, large numbers of canteen and lunch-hour restaurant workers, janitors, and others have lost their jobs altogether. It is a “ticking time bomb for inequality,” says Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom.
Despite such wrenching dislocations, most remote employees say that when the pandemic finally ends, they will want the choice of where they work, with many preferring a flexible mix of office and home. That is a profound shift, with which companies will need to grapple for years. Yes, businesses will save millions on utilities and office rent. And there is also saved productivity, lost before to hours spent in needless meetings or on long commutes.
But the loss from making WFH permanent could be just as big. Those only beginning their careers have struggled to be productive while working from home. And studies show that face-to-face contact is crucial for generating new ideas. Gmail, Google News, and Street View all grew out of chitchat over free gourmet lunches at Google HQ.
Even as offices begin reopening for partial in-person work, many are finding that they need a drastic redesign, with touchless elevators and distanced pods. But in the end, that may be the easiest part, as companies adjust to the WFH age.—Vivienne Walt
A distorted sense of time
When the U.K. locked down owing to the emerging coronavirus last March, Ruth Ogden, an assistant professor of psychology at Liverpool John Moores University, was on maternity leave, at home with her infant daughter and two other young children. Confined to those quarters and conditions, each day felt like a fresh eternity to her.
Ogden’s research focuses on human perception of time, and she wondered: Is everyone feeling this way? So she did an academic study. They didn’t all feel like Ogden, but the vast majority of the 604 participants reported experiencing a distorted sense of time during the country’s lockdown.
That time has been playing tricks on us during the pandemic will surprise no one who, over the course of the past year, has forgotten what day it is, or who in describing daily life has invoked Groundhog Day. There are reasons for that.
When COVID-19 abruptly upended our lives last year, it separated us, almost completely, from the routine and events that usually root our lives in time (and help us commit it to memory)—work, school, dates, social outings, sports events, ceremonies, travel, the things we plan for and look forward to. Life tends to be a blur without those anchors, explains Ogden.
For people who have been able to work from home during the pandemic, that disorienting effect is compounded by the collapsed boundary between work and home, and the now more fluid workday: When does the day begin and end when you can never really leave the virtual pandemic office?
Technology, of course, began eroding the wall between work and home decades ago—dividing employees into boundary-loving “segmenters” and more flexible “integrators”—but experts, like Nancy Rothbard, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, say the pandemic has supercharged that trend. Studies show remote workers are working more. A team with Harvard Business School, using meeting and email metadata of roughly 3.1 million employees around the world, found the pandemic workday was, on average, 48.5 minutes longer. In a sample of its employees, Microsoft found they were more often working at night, through lunch, and over the weekends.
How we’ve experienced the passage of time during the pandemic, though, is more personal, says Ogden. In her study, which she repeated with similar results during the U.K.’s second lockdown this winter, roughly 40% of respondents sensed that time was passing more slowly than usual. Another 40% felt it was moving faster. (And 20%, perhaps essential workers, experienced no change.) The difference, Ogden found, came down to a few factors. For people who were busy, who were satisfied with their social interactions, and who were not stressed, time sped along. For those who were lonely, bored, and experiencing anxiety and depression, it moved slowly.
Will a year on pandemic time, however we experienced it, have long-term implications? Experts expect the workday will remain more flexible and fluid than it was in the before-times, and that—for a while, at least—people may be a bit more appreciative and thoughtful about the time they have and how they use it.
“We’ve realized that a year is quite important,” says Simon Grondin, a psychology professor at Laval University and the author of The Perception of Time: Your Questions Answered. But as the months roll on, ironically enough, he believes that sensitivity to the preciousness of time will disappear.—Erika Fry
The way we work out
Toilet paper wasn’t the only hard-to-find item in the early days of the pandemic. For gym rats, dumbbell shortages and lengthy waits for delivery of Peloton bikes and treadmills became symbols of just how dramatically COVID-19 altered workout culture.
City- and statewide lockdowns shuttered fitness center chains and boutique spin, barre, and yoga studios. In some places, even outdoor exercise was restricted. Like nearly all other aspects of pandemic-era life, exercise too was suddenly an at-home activity, and amateur athletes scrambled to turn a basement or garage or corner of a studio apartment into a personal workout space.
The shift was bad news for brick-and-mortar gyms, with once-buzzy purveyors of in-person fitness struggling to survive. Spin studio Flywheel, for one, filed for bankruptcy in September.
Meanwhile, the pandemic was an enormous boon for makers of in-home workout equipment. Peloton’s sales doubled in its most recent fiscal year to $1.8 billion, as consumers clamored for the company’s connected gear and on-demand app. The company ended its latest quarter with 1.67 million subscribers to its equipment-connected classes and 625,000 subscribers to its app, increases of 134% and 472%, respectively, from the prior year. Hydrow, which sells a $2,200 rowing machine, says its sales jumped 500% in 2020 from the year earlier; it raised a fresh round of $25 million in funding in June to expand its direct-to-consumer distribution. And workout apparel retailer Lululemon paid $500 million to acquire Mirror, maker of wall-mounted screens that offer on-demand workouts, in a bet that the at-home fitness trend will remain hot even if COVID-19 eases.
But for every piece of high-end exercise equipment sold to meet the demands of pandemic-era exercise, there was a low-tech alternative: live yoga classes with a beloved instructor on Zoom, squats with a backpack full of books, a marathon-distance race, run alone in a 20-foot backyard.
The world is eager for the pandemic to subside and for life to return to “normal.” But the at-home fitness trend might just outlast the days of occupancy limits and social distancing. A survey by The New Consumer and Coefficient Capital, published in December, found that 76% of consumers have switched to exercising more at home during COVID-19, and 66% say they prefer it. Technology can re-create some of the camaraderie that exercise classes and crowded weight rooms used to foster—and the convenience of working out at home means there are fewer reasons to not show up.—Claire Zillman
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