DES MOINES, Iowa — There really isn't anything that COVID-19 hasn't changed in the past year— the way Iowans grocery shop, hang out with friends and work are pretty different.
Many Iowans are heading back to work in the office amid vaccine rollout, leaving a lot of folks wondering how the pandemic has permanently changed the way they work.
"I think what you see is this pandemic has accelerated the trend to telework," said Matthew Mitchell, who teaches business strategies at Drake University.
Mitchell said researchers and economists estimate 20-25% of Americans will be working from home in the next few years, compared to the 5% working from home before the pandemic.
Here's the thing— working from home isn't going to happen for every job out there.
"You think about the workers that you know, are able to work from home, it's your knowledge workers, it's your white-collar workers, those workers that sit behind a desk all day and can Zoom in many different meetings," Mitchell said. "But unfortunately, those workers that were most essential during the pandemic are the ones that couldn't work from home. And even you know, what's more sad, you know, these inequities will persist. These essential workers are largely made up of jobs with low hourly wages."
The telework movement will show the growing divides between high and low-wage workers, but it'll also show disparities in who has access to good, reliable internet and who doesn't.
"In Iowa, you know, 302,000 of our citizens lack access to a wired broadband connection with speeds, you know, 25 megabits or higher. 100,000 residents don't have access to any wired connection," Mitchell said. "So there is a digital divide, there are the haves and the have nots, some have access to good quality, reliable, reasonably priced internet, some do not."
The bottom line is the landscape for how people work is changing permanently and faster than expected, all thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"When we go forward to work, we're never going back to work, we can only go forward, and it's going to look very different," Mitchell said.