While talk of the metaverse begins, which will even require a specific (meta) labor regulation, the reality is that Spain . So far with not too spectacular results.
In fact, the level of teleworking achieved during the pandemic in Spain would have been 3.6 times less than its maximum potential. This is reflected in the study Productive model, employment and quality of employment. Keys to a post-pandemic future by researchers Rafael Muñoz de Bustillo Llorente from the University of Salamanca, and Enrique Fernández Macías from the Joint Research Center of the European Commission, recently published by Funcas.
Why this failure?
According to the data from the Active Population Survey (EPA), in the fourth quarter of 2021 only 6.2% of wage earners worked from home regularly (more than half the days), their lowest level in two years of pandemic, compared to the 15.3% that was reached when the confinement was imposed, in March 2020. , a figure below the EU (10.8%) and which is less than half of that reached by countries such as Finland, Luxembourg or Ireland.
But the weight lost by regular teleworking has been gained by the occasional one. Thus, it has gone from 1.7% in 2019 in 2019 as a whole to 4.4%, the highest level in the historical series. In fact, it is this format, closer to the so-called hybrid model. the one that explains the in the last quarter of 2021.
This evolution could support those who argue that the new , has encouraged occasional teleworking over the usual by ‘overregulating’ the conditions of remote work. At least compared to the previous regulations, from 2012, which in practice entrusted everything to the agreement between companies and workers.
However, this does not explain the mystery of why teleworking has not yet started, despite the fact that technology has allowed it for decades. The question here would be: how many employees can really telework in Spain? One of the most used to calculate this model was the one proposed by a team led by Matteo Sostero in 2020, which is the one followed by Muñoz de Bustillo Llorente and Fernández Macías for their work.
This model considers two types of barriers to teleworking: physical and technological, called ‘hard’, and those related to the interaction that occurs between people, which we can classify as ‘soft’ limitations.
During the first wave, in which physical contact was reduced to a minimum by quarantines, only hard limitations counted. Those jobs that did not require direct physical interaction with things or people could be done remotely. This is what is called the technical potential of teleworking, the maximum number of people who can telework in an economy. And how many workers could be in that situation? According to Sotero’s work, a maximum of 37% of employees in the European Union. In the case of Spain, this maximum is somewhat lower and remains at 34%.
However, this estimate exceeds between three and four times (3.6 times for Spain) the percentage of professionals who finally teleworked in 2020. In defense of our country, it can be said that we are at the European average. Only Finland and Ireland ever exceeded half of their technical potential.
The clearest explanation for this lag is the weight of soft constraints. Jobs that require “complex social interaction, such as that of teachers, psychologists or health professionals, can be carried out remotely”, “”.
That is to say, that solutions such as videoconferences do not cover the sensory gap (it is not the same to use five senses in communication than only two) that arises in the remote performance of the activity.
This is something that, in the business world, can be seen in the relatively , which has challenged the perspectives of those who considered them a model that was not going to survive the pandemic.
Almost two thirds of technically ‘teleworkable’ jobs require this “complex social interaction”. So that the potential of ‘real’ telework is much lower than the technical one. How much? The estimate reduces it from 37% to 13% for the EU and from 34% to 12% for Spain, figures much closer to those that were actually recorded during the pandemic.
In this sense, the commitment to the metaverse promises to solve this ‘gap’ caused by the need for “complex social interaction”, through the development of an immersive technology that allows breaking the physical limitation, which would raise the threshold of teleworking activities up to a much higher level in the future.
The patents filed by Meta and other companies point in this direction, although they are still far from a fully operational virtual reality.
But keep in mind that the success of teleworking is not determined by the possibility that a task can be performed remotely. It influences from the cost of the equipment to the personal situation of each member of the staff.
Problems that had to be improvised forcibly during the pandemic and that do not respond to the technological and social evolution that the process would have followed under normal conditions. The same ones we are returning to now.
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