At the time of writing, Trinidad and Tobago is in the midst of a sharp spike in our coronavirus cases and like a lot of other people in the country, I am back to working from home. Since the original lockdown in March 2020, I have only actually been into my office in Point Lisas a handful of times. Our offices remain open mainly to provide the essential training and certification services that we need to deliver to the industry, but like many of our members, our policy remains that whoever can work from home, should work from home.
One of the obvious consequences of the work from home policies that have been implemented either by national or corporate entities across the world is a reassessment of the role of the office. If people are going to be mainly working from home, do you need extensive real estate for them in city centres? Commuting to and from the office has been a feature of modern life for many decades.
In Trinidad, many people have spent many hours every day on clogged roads getting to and from offices and dropping children to and from schools. In the process, we have consumed vast quantities of gasoline and diesel, and every commuter driving a private passenger car has pumped out tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) every year. The decreases in greenhouse gas emissions that have come about as a result of the pandemic lockdowns across the world have been driven in large part by the decrease in consumption of liquid fuels by the personal transport sector, including the aviation industry.
Some analysts have predicted that post-COVID-19, people are not going to be rushing back to the office. Many companies have found that they have had higher productivity with much of their workforce working from home and many people, myself included, have enjoyed not having to spend hours every day in traffic going to sit in an office, just to be in front of a computer screen.
Online meetings are not the same as in-person meetings and I do miss the camaraderie of some face-to-face contact, but I have found that for some meetings, the video conference set-up works very well. The online meeting format allows people to quickly and politely make points and share information and the slightly formal process of ‘raising hands’ and unmuting microphones means that all voices get a chance of being heard (as long as the bandwidth holds out). And of course, the video conference is an excellent way of bringing in multiple voices from diverse geographical regions, without the huge expense and time taken for international travel. It has proved especially useful for the Caribbean Chambers Network (CARICHAM), which I have been privileged to ask to lead for the next year.
While it is difficult to predict how things are going to develop post-COVID-19, I think that the pandemic is going to lead to many people questioning the role of the office and traditional commuting. There are some well-respected analysts who predict that 2019 will be the peak in the use of petroleum products as transport fuels. While that might be an exaggerated prediction, it is not hard to see the short-term COVID-19- inspired decrease in travel as accentuating the longer-term trend away from the internal combustion engine. I would suspect that even if we have not seen the peak in oil demand quite yet, the pandemic would have brought the date forward.
It is also going to be interesting to see if there are indeed significant redesigns in how offices are used in city centres. Given the massive sunk capital in downtown buildings, is it possible that we will see offices being retrofitted as residential flats and a return to more people living closer to city centres? That would certainly be popular with many young people in major cities like London and New York where city centre homes have become out of reach even for well-paid young professionals. It would be nice to think that this could provide an opportunity for Port of Spain to be redeveloped to attract people to live in the city again and recreate a vibrant urban environment.
All of this is a good reminder that decreasing the carbon footprint from transport is not just about switching from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, but about redesigning how people move about and how our urban areas are designed. The pandemic has led to interesting questions about the role of the office and presents an excellent opportunity to rethink and reimagine the traditional commute from suburb to city centre office and back again.