Attention: this text was originally published on November 26th, 2021 on the Movimento Choice blog.
You can access this article in Portuguese by clicking here.
Work relations in complex environments
If your new office becomes your own home (or some coworking space), there is a need to guarantee your rights as a worker. Otherwise, it just becomes a great cost-cutting opportunity for the company.”
Recently, I started to develop some marketing and communication activities with Verakis, a French institution that works with the mediation and dissemination of information about food and food sciences, mainly between Brazil and European countries. People from France and Portugal, in addition to other regions of Brazil, actively participate in Verakis. Even before what happened in mid-2020, everything was happening this way: networked, based on partnerships, and without physical headquarters.
By March, we know very well why much of what we knew as the “traditional work model” fell apart. In many places, the “5 by 8” scheme has given way to the remote model. Large corporations have the structure (including financial ones) to quickly carry out this transformation. However, the same cannot be said for small businesses.
DAVID
“Reinvention” was the term used to adapt to the new exposed reality. Rede Globo even launched the project LAE — Let’s Activate Entrepreneurship. Impact businesses such as Instituto RESocial emerged to minimize theeffects of a sudden stop in the economy.
But at the end of the day, the small business ends up having little or no access to easy-to-use loans to support itself in times of exception, with the direct consequence of its closure. Reality knocked, and almost 1 million people lost their jobs because of the event of the year. The solution found, at least in the short term, was to go to a place where everyone is accessible — the digital environment.
GOLIATH
XP Inc, one of the largest independent Brazilian brokers, has already created permanent vacancies for the home office. PepsiCo, a multinational in the food and beverage sector, made official its “new flexible work policy”. Very interesting initiatives from the point of view of employee freedom, but it is important — and necessary — to think about what the new working conditions will be for these people. Will there be any kind of subsidy for the use of the internet? Ergonomic chair? Footrest? Computer support? Any food aid?
If your new office becomes your own home (or some coworking space), there is a need to guarantee your rights as a worker. Otherwise, it just becomes a great cost-cutting opportunity for the company.
AND NOW JOSE?
But does every type of business have this ability to adapt? Are we doomed to the home office, remote work, and the like?
Technology and communication sectors such as advertising, marketing, and online commerce were able to adapt quickly. The same happened with positions aimed at decision-making, but the great mass, the “factory floor”, did not have the same opportunity.
The year 2020 is atypical, there’s no denying it. It is not by chance that the anthropologist and historian Lilia Moritz Schwarcz states, in her book “When the 20th Century Ends”, that this is the year in which we finally begin to face the increasingly complex challenges of our society. The way we look at our work is just one of them.
I don’t believe we need to think of just one working model. In such a black-and-white world, there are more than 50 shades of gray (laughs). In addition to an ethnic issue, diversity will always be welcome. May we not hold on to the models of the past when building the futures we want.
