A Perspective towards a New Normality and Working Conditions following COVID-19
| A Perspective towards a New Normality and Working Conditions following COVID-19 | |
|---|---|
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 NUI Galway | |
| Team Organizations | NUI Galway Data Science Institute Insight Centre for Data Analytics |
| Team Leaders | Martin Serrano |
| City, State | Palo Alto CA |
| Contributors | Achille Zappa Yasar Khan Hoan Q. Nguyen Qaiser Mehmood Niall O’Brolchain Alex Acquier |
| Website | |
| Document | Download |
Description
After the first outbreak on COVID-19 in China, the spread to Europe and other continents, the WHO’s pandemic declaration, the already long duration of confinement conditions in some countries and the unknown effects on everybody’s life, we are yet to see the long effects of the pandemic evolution. Society is yet over studying and analysing what will be the economic and social consequences in the longer term globally. One thing is certain, the biggest impact so far is in people’s behaviour. It is too early yet to talk about the psychology of people after COVID- 19 but one of the clearest consequences is the trust that people have lost in relation to health conditions, not only in their closed circle of individuals, but also in others surrounding them. People are thinking now, about how many of those individuals around them are healthy? or who has not worried about going outside and thinking twice if it is safe (healthy), to use the public transport which is shared with other individuals or going into a place with another group of unknown people. Those questions may remain for a long time and certainly the worst of the pandemic effects is how society as a whole can trust each other to ensure good health.
As a research and scientific community we are all committed to address the challenges of COVID-19, from the most complex aspect, which is to find a solution to also find contention methods or also generate best practices for living or also best practices to pass through the COVID-19 effects. A series of informative documents have been generated and knowing a lot of information has been published already. In this document we only focus on collecting experiences from people who usually worked in open office environments and from those who their main activity involves interacting with others, either in small meeting rooms and/or medium size group meetings or simply in office corridors, in labs, in a classroom and/or in general indoors locations. The document will describe some ideas but also some facts in a form of recommendations on how people can safely return to do their work after COVID-19 pandemic lockdown is lifted. This can be considered as a wish list of overall (general) and specific (particular) requirements that potentially can help to recover trust. It is possible some of these measures have already been implemented but if not they certainty will be relatively easy to implement and the main benefit of considering them is gaining trust to make people feel safe at work. Those activities and measures that need to be implemented shall be taken as methods to enable people to develop, not only new methods, but also to provide indirect psychological support for a new normal start in terms of work practices after the pandemic.
Guidelines
