The Future of Work: COVID-19 and beyond

Abstract

The articles in this special section focus on how we conduct work has and will change post COVID-19. Advances in pervasive computing are rapidly changing the way we work. Pervasive computing can improve the way workers connect into productive teams; it vastly improves the ability of organizations to collect and process data; and it provides new tools for using data in feedback loops that affect the physical or virtual world, both as personalized, small-scale interventions and as broad, largescale actions, and policy. These changes were accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in a sudden and dramatic change in how we work. For many of us, the well-known mainstays of work-the eight-hour workday, the office building, the morning commute, the salient boundaries between work and personal life, in-person conversations with coworkers, and sending children to school or daycare-were gone or drastically different than they were before. And, for far too many people, the issues of inequity and racial injustice were even more pronounced than before; sections of the population bore the brunt of the difficulties far more than others. While we all hope that the COVID-19 crisis will soon subside, some of its effects are likely to remain; not all office buildings will open back in a full-time format, not all jobs lost will be available again, and the way we used to think about productivity and work-life balance may never be the same. There is also a continued risk of leaving behind workers who are unable to balance rapidly changing work responsibilities with increased demands placed on their personal lives.