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OPINION: From wooden blocks to clocking off - how we can draw parallels between 19th century social reform and the 'new normal'.

Every week I get a copy of The Guardian Weekly, a compact version of the popular newspaper that combines the best of The Guardian and The Observer together to give the reader informative, yet not overly elongated or seemingly interminable articles.

In this week's issue, there was a story written by Andrew Anthony about the influx of people that are now working from home (which Anthony coins 'WFH' and so I will too) due to COVID-19.

Last month, just 34 per cent of white collar workers had returned to the office. Additionally, last year we saw approximately 1.5 million people out of a workforce of 36.6 million were WFH. Cue the lockdown however, and more than 46 per cent of those in employment took to WFH, with 57 per cent of London employees also using their living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens as office spaces.

Whilst these figures struck me as evidence of the constantly evolving time that we are immersed in, what was of greater interest to me came on the following page.

Within the article, Anthony interviewed a public servant who faintly outlines his company as an organisation who "liaises… with a large number of other public bodies". As vague as this may be, within such a body lies a clever initiative to boost output whilst working from home.

When employees are logged onto the company's servers, a traffic light system operates which shows whether the colleague in question is busy- red for occupied, green for free. If the home laptop keyboard isn't touched for a couple of minutes, then the light will turn amber. "The aim is to encourage faster and more efficient communication between colleagues", according to the public servant, but that it also adds "pressure to be seen working" because your productivity and output is being displayed to all your colleagues that are online at that time.

This immediately got me thinking, naturally, about my History A Level course.

I remembered learning about a 19th century cotton mill owner, philanthropist and social reformer named Robert Owen.

In the turn of the century he established New Lanark mill in the midlands of Scotland, which became both a vehicle and a symbol for his forward-thinking and inclusive social ideas.

At New Lanark, employees were treated much more equally and with greater working conditions than preceding institutions, as well as having access to benefits such as free (and good quality) education; the first school was set up within the mill in 1816.

This tangible channel for change birthed an even more progressive idea which transformed the way in which we work today.

Owen abandoned the very common use of punishments as a means to raise productivity and instead focused on incentives to work.

One of these motivations was in the form of a 'silent monitor', which was a wooden block that hung above every workstation and publicly identified the quality of each worker's efforts through a different colour block.

Black for was poor productivity, blue for adequate, yellow for good and white for excellent.

These blocks were reviewed and amended daily by mill supervisors to reflect the standard of efficiency for every worker. Owen remarked that by appealing to the sense of social standing between the individual worker and their peers rather than accentuating and emphasising a master and worker division, the output of the workers at New Lanark was considerably larger than workers at mills that enforced strict punishments.

The reason why I subjected you to a snippet of A Level History was because I believe the case of Robert Owen's mill at New Lanark and Andrew Anthony's The Guardian article about WFH share an important likeness.

Apart from the buzzword of 'Coronavirus' that we have all heard unbearingly countless times in the past six months, the main phrase that I have heard in the echo chambers of Parliamentary conferences, news outlets and general public conversation is that we are living in an unprecedented time, an era like never before.

And while this is true to an extent, it is crucial to recognise that like all times of development and adaptation, a social element is intrinsic to that time.

The questions that we have all been asking during the era of Covid are all based around social alterations and what implications these amendments to our society will bring.

Fundamentally, these times of social change have happened innumerable times before, both in the UK and internationally.

When Robert Owen first established New Lanark in 1800, social turbulence was rife and change was everywhere. Working class individuals were beginning to question their previously entrenched and socially accepted place in society, the first talks of trade unions were being held and the first whiff of smoke from the mechanical cogs of industrialisation were beginning to permeate the air.

Indeed, Owen contributed towards this social change himself by going against the norms of how a workplace was run.

By the end of that century, steps had been taken to improve the environments that we live in that nobody could have foreseen.

Since we can make evident connections between the early 1800s and the prevailingly modern times of 2020 and beyond, there is reason to hope that we will emerge from the virus stronger, within our local communities, national societies and as a race as a whole.