How Covid-19 pandemic is changing the future of work in Kenya

Whereas statistics indicated that out of close to 19 million Kenyans actively engaged in some economic activity, only 4.5 million had access to a computer at home, making it difficult for companies to roll out work-from-home programmes.

Despite these challenges, it was quite inevitable that both companies and employees had to learn how to adapt.

“We all know that work will never be the same, even if we don’t yet know all the ways in which it will be different,”

said Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder and chief executive officer at Slack Technologies.

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New messaging and communicating tools and applications were innovated as the world raced to enable employees to work from home. Among these were SKype, Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft’s Teams. For instance, Microsoft has announced that it would make available its hub for teamwork in Office 365, Microsoft Teams, for free to the public to enable remote working.

Teams is a chat-based collaboration tool that provides global, remote, and dispersed teams with the ability to work together and share information via a common space.

“By making Teams available to as many people as possible, we hope that we can support public health and safety by making remote work even easier,”

said Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365.

According to Kepha Ochoi, a researcher with ACAL Covid-19 Thinktank, being the first in the office and the last to leave is no longer a measure of an employee’s commitment and performance.

“From telemedicine in hospitals to remote learning for public schools and streaming fitness classes, every industry has accelerated its own digital transformation. As a result, the demand for highly skilled remote workers will continue to increase,”

he says.

With the world of work changing, it now remains to be seen how the future of work through artificial intelligence will fit into the new reality.

“Artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics will make this shift as significant as the mechanization in prior generations of agriculture and manufacturing,”

says McKinsey.

In the same vein, Ochoi says that going forward, winning organisations will be those that will integrate and master digital work, community and collaboration, full digital transformation, supported by a truly virtual workforce.