Chapter 24: Work Time, Place and Space in the ‘New Normal’

Work time, space and place continues to evolve as technological development and broader societal change transform routines and locations of work. Flexibility is becoming a more widespread feature of paid work as work continues to evolve and move out of traditional locations, with greater location-independence present in the tasks of many occupations (Zhu, 2013). While it is gradual change that characterises trends in work time and location (Felstead and Reushke, 2020; Wheatley, 2020), sudden change can and does occur. The response to the global pandemic in 2020–2021 provides the most recent example of a sudden change that has had particular impacts on both location and routines of work. The pandemic and associated response including lockdowns prompted a large-scale move to remote working from home and accelerated the adoption of video conferencing and virtual collaborative working tools. The emerging evidence from the pandemic-induced rapid expansion of remote and virtual working highlights the significance of a number of dimensions of job quality, including the nature of work, levels of control and the quality of relationships, to the well-being of workers, organisations and society (Kniffin et al., 2021). The impacts of the pandemic have been the focus of much recent investigation (Chung et al., 2021; Wheatley et al., 2021), and wider debates have arisen on the future of work and what work will look like in what has been termed the ‘new normal’.