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الصين وحتمية تبني العمل عن بُـعـد

May 13, 2021 Nancy Qian

شيكاغو ــ قبل الجائحة، كانت الشركات والعمال في مختلف أنحاء العالم يستخدمون البريد الإلكتروني والمحادثات الهاتفية الجماعية لتقليل تكاليف الاتصال. لكن الافتقار إلى التنسيق جعل استخدام هذه التكنولوجيات أمرا بالغ الصعوبة. كانت كتابة رسالة بريد إلكتروني أمرا سهلا، لكن لم يكن هناك ما يضمن متى يرد عليها الشخص الآخر. كان الناس عازفين عن كسر العادات القديمة. فربما يفسر المشاركون في اجتماع افتراضي قرار عقده عبر الإنترنت على أنه يعني أن موضوعه ليس مهما. في عموم الأمر، عمل انخفاض الطلب على تثبيط تطور المنتجات، الأمر الذي أدى إلى تجاهل الكثير من العناصر المرغوبة التي كان من الواجب أن تشتمل عليها العديد من تطبيقات محال العمل.

من خلال إجبار قطاعات اقتصادية بأكملها على العمل الافتراضي، نجحت جائحة مرض فيروس كورونا 2019 (كوفيد-19) في حل العديد من مشاكل التنسيق السابقة هذه. فقد اضطر الجميع في هذه القطاعات إلى الاستثمار في تكنولوجيات جديدة وتعلم كيفية استخدامها. ولأن الجميع أصبحوا في ذات القارب، فلم يعد خطر تفسير الاجتماع الافتراضي في ضوء سلبي واردا. الأفضل من هذا هو أن استخدام تطبيقات محل العمل أصبح أكثر سهولة بمرور كل أسبوع.

في الولايات المتحدة، تبنت شركات مثل جوجل وهيئات حكومية مثل مجلس الاحتياطي الفيدرالي محال العمل الافتراضية وأعلنت أن عددا كبيرا من موظفيها سيستمرون في العمل عن بُـعد بعد انقضاء الجائحة. وهذا أمر منطقي: حيث تخفض الشركات نفقاتها العقارية، ويكتسب الموظفون المزيد من المرونة في جداول أعمالهم واختيارهم لمكان معيشتهم. علاوة على ذلك، يعني تناقص عدد ركاب وسائل النقل تقليل تلوث الهواء وازدحام المناطق الحضرية.

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j. von Hettlingen May 17, 2021

Nancy Qian says the Covid-19 pandemic has reshaped our office schedules in the West, changing how and where we can work. With hundreds of millions of people living under lockdowns, many have made the abrupt shift to working from home, while millions have lost their jobs. Remote work has become so widespread that telecommuting may be here to stay. As a result, many economic sectors have to invest in new technologies to meet the challenges.
According to the author, “China has not followed suit, even though the social and environmental payoffs would be far larger than in the US and Europe.” Teleworking could be “a creative way to address two of China’s biggest problems - declining urban fertility and air quality. Chinese policymakers and firms should allow more employees to work remotely as much as possible. It is a low-cost strategy that can be implemented flexibly, according to the individual needs of firms and workers. The potential economic and social benefits could be immense.”
In China, “many sectors have been able to function relatively normally over the past year.” As early as late March, 60 % of office-based employees were already back at their desks, according to one report. “As a result, there has been neither a wholesale shift to virtual work nor much discussion of new workplace models for the post-pandemic era. Paradoxically, the benefits that China risks foregoing would be even more advantageous for its economy than for those of the US or Europe.”
The author explains how “virtual technologies can reduce the cost of living for many workers. Raising children in urban China is prohibitively expensive. In Shanghai, residential real estate costs $1,453 per square foot in the city center, on average, but the average annual wage income for a full-time employee is only around $12,000. Worse, a typical professional in these areas works a “9-9-6” schedule: nine in the morning to nine at night, six days per week – a 72-hour workweek.”
Compared to their US counterparts in New York, “Chinese urbanites must work far more,” and earn “much less while paying similar housing prices.” Urban parents also “face substantial time scarcities. Because the average Chinese primary school student spends seventeen hours per week doing homework and six hours per week with tutors, parents need a lot of time to cajole and monitor their children (all the more so if they need to take them to enrichment activities or extra tutoring).”
For many parents, working from home could “make all the differences.” Normalising virtual workplaces “can help address China’s demographic and environmental challenges. The reason for declining fertility is obvious: child rearing is too expensive. More telecommuting would cut the cost of child rearing and housing by enabling more families to move farther away from the city center. Parents, freed from commuting, could spend more time with their kids. And reducing the number of commuters would lower air pollution,” which accounts for an estimated 1.24 million deaths in 2017.
Chinese companies - especially tech firms - “that have experimented with telecommuting have found that productivity for some types of work is similar regardless of where it is carried out. And the pandemic has already demonstrated many of the environmental benefits of reduced commuting. To ensure that car ownership does not increase in the post-COVID move to suburbs, the government should expand the provision of public transportation into these areas.”
The problem is that overall, information technology spending accounts for less than 4% of China’s GDP in the first three quarters of 2019 – compared with more than 10% in the US.
The country, which relies on its 30 million SMEs for more than 60% of GDP, doesn’t have a standardised enterprise service provider anywhere near the same scale of Salesforce. Other western companies – like IBM and Oracle – have long been available, but they only target large firms.
Despite promising signs, investors say it will take China some time to catch up. One reason is the more fragmented market situation - startups can not rely on standardised procedures and have to invest considerable resources toward tailoring their programmes to different needs. They also offer services for free or at a discount to win new customers, which raises questions about future revenues.
But there is hope that Chinese companies are more willing to pay, and the pandemic is making them realise the benefits of their investment.
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الصين وحتمية تبني العمل عن بُـعـد

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