INTRODUCTION
With the pandemic, remote work went from being a minority option to the norm overnight. Is it here to stay? The answer largely depends on the type of work: as the economist John Muller notes when discussing the «economy of agglomeration», some jobs gain when people share a space and others barely need it.
Remote work has clear advantages —the saving on commuting is the most cited— but it deserves to be looked at with professional judgement. In social work our experience is clear: intervention requires an in-person human relationship. At a distance you lose the warmth of eye contact, gesture, the relationship of trust, the everyday closeness that sustains the bond with the person being helped.
This is not an isolated impression. The Opinion of the Ethics Committee of the General Council of Social Work (February 2021) addressed these limits. From our practice we state it plainly: a Social Diagnosis cannot be drawn up from telephone interviews. Direct, in-person attention is essential both to diagnose and to design the Social Intervention Plan.
The conclusion is not to give up the technological advances, which have proved their worth, but to put them in their place: to keep them and, at the same time, to prioritise the personal relationship. An irreplaceable value that defines the very essence of social work.