GEORGINA IS IN no hurry to get back to the office. The 37-year-old, who works in financial services in Geneva, has been working from home for most of the past year. Doing so allowed her to skip her commute, wear tracksuit bottoms and avoid awkward conversations about her pregnancy. She is now on maternity leave but her colleagues are trickling back into the office. Meetings all still take place via Zoom; her colleagues dial in individually from their desks so those working from home do not feel excluded. But Georgina worries that, as restrictions ease, people will rush back to their pre-pandemic ways and that working from home will once again be the exception. Videoconferencing platforms, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom (now so ubiquitous it has become a verb), made remote work possible as covid-19 spread and countries locked down. Staff once needed permission to work from home; they now need it to go to the office. All kinds of work that once took place in person-from yoga classes to medical appointments-have moved online. The daily number of participants in Zoom meetings jumped from around 10m at most at the end of December 2019 to more than 300m four months later.
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