Mumbai: With work-from-home becoming a new normal during the COVID-19 pandemic, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said this trend will continue even after the pandemic.
“It is amazing to see how well the work from home (WFH) culture has worked and I hope will continue even after the pandemic is over,” Gates told an online business summit organised by The Economic Times.
“But once this pandemic ends, we will rethink on what percentage of time we spend in offices… 20, 30, 50 per cent. Lots of companies will expect their employees to spend well below 50 per cent of their time in offices and may be the rest of the companies will go the normal way,” he said.
Gates, who co-founded Microsoft and also the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said he also hasn’t travelled for work this entire year. “Honestly I have got time to do much more. It’s been…eye opening for me,” he said.
However, Gates feels that the software has to improve a lot for the WFH to become more engaging.
On his outlook after the pandemic gets over, Gates said “the message from me and others resulted in very little… Even the US, from which you would expect to have the best response with the great scientific research, did a very poor job in getting ready with this and now we are faced with incredible damage.
“Hopefully we will learn our lessons and be better ready next time but in the meanwhile we have so much work to be done.”
Criticising China, Gates said China did not do a perfect job in getting the data out initially about the virus, which according to him, wasted time.
