The Future of Work: COVID-19 and Beyond

The articles in this special section focus on how we conduct work has and will change post COVID-19. Advances in pervasive computing are rapidly changing the way we work. Pervasive computing can improve the way workers connect into productive teams;it vastly improves the ability of organizations to collect and process data;and it provides new tools for using data in feedback loops that affect the physical or virtual world, both as personalized, small-scale interventions and as broad, largescale actions, and policy. These changes were accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in a sudden and dramatic change in how we work. For many of us, the well-known mainstays of work—the eight-hour workday, the office building, the morning commute, the salient boundaries between work and personal life, in-person conversations with coworkers, and sending children to school or daycare—were gone or drastically different than they were before. And, for far too many people, the issues of inequity and racial injustice were even more pronounced than before;sections of the population bore the brunt of the difficulties far more than others. While we all hope that the COVID-19 crisis will soon subside, some of its effects are likely to remain;not all office buildings will open back in a full-time format, not all jobs lost will be available again, and the way we used to think about productivity and work-life balance may never be the same. There is also a continued risk of leaving behind workers who are unable to balance rapidly changing work responsibilities with increased demands placed on their personal lives.