It’s been over a year since we all hunkered down for what we thought would be two or three weeks (or a month max!) to wait for the virus to come-and-go out of our lives.  Little did we know it would take more than a year for life to slowly return to normal.  Almost.

We were so naïve then.  If you had told me over half a million people would die in one year (equal to all US fatalities for WWI and WWII) I would not have believed you.  But here we are.

So, let’s look at what’s happened of note during the last year in the world of work.

What was unexpected? What changed temporarily? What changed for good?  

The effect on women was unexpected.  This pandemic-induced recession was the first recession to cause more women to lose jobs than men.  Other recessions have affected male dominated industries like financial services, large manufacturing.  This recession affected the service sector, restaurants, hospitality and retail where mostly women are employed.  Also, having kids home from school and caregiving for ill family members have all meant that women were hit hardest and will take longer to recover economically.

Some changes were only temporary.  Although communicating through zoom became the norm, and enjoying the extra time of not commuting to work became a perk, these changes were temporary.  Luckily, it seems like we’ll get to keep some scaled down version of both with us.

However, some things changed for good.  Work from home is now widely accepted.  Even employers who were suspicious of work-from-home arrangements before the pandemic, had no choice but accept the evidence:  productivity doesn’t necessarily suffer when working from home.  The work-from-home genie is out of the bottle and employees now expect to be able to work from home at least some of the time.

©Copyright Eva Del Rio.  Send questions to eva@evadelrio.com