After consulting our substantial network of industry contacts, Reinsurance News found that a majority of respondents currently feel safe returning to an office-based working environment, 14 months on from COVID-19’s elevation to pandemic status by the World Health Organisation.
COVID-19’s impact as a highly contagious respiratory disease, compounded early on by broadly-ineffective containment efforts from unprepared governmental powers, is one that will undoubtedly come to define this half of the 21st century.
While many of the world’s developed nations have gained a handle on COVID-19 and are busy implementing recovery strategies, a number of emerging countries remain treading water, struggling to maintain order on both a financial and humanitarian front.
At 42%, the number of market participants ready to return to their pre-Covid working environment is encouraging to see, but should be viewed more as a broad snapshot of opinion than anything.
From the comments we received it became clear that each individual’s feeling of safety depended on a variety of things such as vaccination status, office location the assumption of various social distancing measures.
25% of those approached indicated that they would not feel safe with returning to their companies’ offices until the end of 2021. For many companies this would represent close to two years of remote work from their employees.
While clearly an effective COVID-19 countermeasure, the rise of remote work has itself created a variety of headaches and will undoubtedly continue redefining our perception of, and interaction with, office spaces.
Phishing techniques aimed at stealing a person’s personal information had been on the decline from Q4 2019 to Q1 2020, but the pandemic created an ideal scenario for cybercriminals to thrive, according to a report from Beazley last year.
The majority of social engineering attacks were said to result in a business email compromise, where the cybercriminal gains access to an email account.
However, during last year’s second quarter cybercriminals were found to have been most successful in stealing funds using social engineering techniques.
As a result of this rising trend, a number of firms such as Hyperion X and Aon moved to further develop and fund their respective cyber insurance suites.
Returning to our findings, it was discovered that 16%, while not currently ready to return to their companies’ offices, would be willing to go back at some point in the next three months.
17% said they would not consider it for at least another 12 months, perhaps evidence of a growing preference for remote work.
Indeed, according to research conducted last September by Accumulate Capital, 73% of business leaders anticipate that UK businesses will downsize their offices in 2021, reducing the size of the commercial real estate market and subsequently the commercial property insurance market.
