Closing Statement. Lessons From the Pandemic for the Future of Work

• Author: Scott Fulton
• Position: President
• Pages: 64-64

64 | THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, September/October 2021.

Copyright © 2021, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

ELI REPORT

DURING the spring of 2020,

while we were in the early

grip of the pandemic, I pointed

in this column to a possible silver-

lining. Perhaps what appeared then

to be broad societal acceptance of

the science around the coronavirus

might leave us better able to also

rally around the science on our other

mega challenge — climate change.

Well, the broad consensus on pan-

demic science hasn’t exactly held. The

prior administration downplayed the

pandemic — and the science behind it

— in an effort to rally the economy and

stir up support for a reelection bid. Then,

with the turnover at the White House

and in the Senate, the politicization of



questioning whether a scourge that has

disrupted lives everywhere and killed

over four million people is actually an

elaborate hoax.

But this doesn’t mean that we have

nothing to learn from the pandemic.

Our collective experience in shifting to

the use of remote engagement tools,

the quantum leap in the quality of those

tools, and our discovery that we can-

not only hold our own but in some

cases increase our productivity, should

mean something going forward. Indeed,

if, when we reach the other side of the

pandemic, we simply snap back to how

things were done before, we will be

missing a major opportunity to reshape

our approach to work in ways that can

enlarge our impact, improve quality of

life, and contribute to our environmental

objectives.

Let’s take ELI’s experience. We, like

everyone, were quite concerned about

whether our programming could survive

a period of home sequestration. But we

pivoted to virtual approaches, and ex-

perienced, to our amazement, dramatic

bump-ups in most of our activity mea-

sures. So, for example, we saw through

the use of virtual engagement tools

a dramatic increase in the number of

educational programs that we were able

to bring forward and a near doubling of

attendance at those programs. We were

likewise able to increase the number of

podcasts we produced and saw a near

doubling in podcast listenership. Our

video views also nearly doubled. Down-

loads of our research reports also saw a

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increases in both productivity and reach.

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the increases in productivity signal that

virtual tools are making us more ef-

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ever-improving quality of our products,

but there is clearly more going on than

that alone. The increases in listenership,

viewership, and participation also signal

recovered bandwidth within our com-

munity.

There’s no doubt that for some, regu-

lar work has been down, which helped

enlarge the space for engaging with ELI’s

programs. But a current that cuts across

organizations and sectors is the harvest

of time that came from greatly limiting

all forms of movement — travel, com-

muting, trips across town, and jaunts up

and down the halls and stairs for meet-

ings. From this collective experience,

we have learned just how much time is

consumed in moving about and what is

possible when we put it to other use.

And of course it’s not just time that

is saved — there is potential for reduc-

ing environmental impacts. There is

considerably more study needed of the

trade-offs between the energy demands

connected to remote, distributed work,

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work performed in installations that are

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But we do know for sure that less

transportation means better local air

quality and a smaller carbon footprint.

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fewer mass-transit hassles, fewer airport

and transit irritations — perhaps a net

reduction in some of the more grinding

aspects of modern life. This is no doubt

why many surveyed employees don’t

want to return to the way things were.

There are no panaceas when it

comes to human systems, and an all-re-

mote, all-the-time approach is not prob-

lem free. Inequities can emerge between

those whose work is portable and those

whose work is not. The cohesion of

work teams can suffer. Networking and

forming new relationships can take more

effort. The spontaneous synergies and

collective creativity that comes from in-

ventive people being in proximity can be

lost. There is also the problem of losing

the physical separation between work

and home and the tendency for many

of us to just never stop working in the

absence of such a seam. For these rea-

sons, the work of the future will likely

need to include some elements of the

past. But the new normal should also

carry forward with strength some of

the learning and tools from this bizarre,

abnormal period from which we are

hoping to emerge. We can work differ-

ently — and should.

Scott Fulton

PRESIDENT

Lessons From the Pandemic

for the Future of Work

Closing Statement