This is my third and final installment of Our World on Hold, my take on the pandemic. In the first installment, two weeks ago, I wrote about my take on our current situation and the fallout from the government response to the pandemic. Last week, I provided my thoughts on the interim period from the outbreak of the pandemic to the point when the virus has been defeated through the development of and distribution of a vaccine to protect everyone who wishes to be protected.
This installment is about my thoughts about what happens when we can go back to the way we were, BC (Before Covid-19). Since I think it will be two years from the outbreak to worldwide protection from an effective vaccine, we’re talking about sometime in 2022. That’s enough time to form new habits and break old patterns. Will we go back to the way we were or will we be changed forever? Will we make some different choices?
From the standpoint of the ability to work from home, this experience could permanently create more virtual companies or, at least, more virtual employees. When we figure out how to make this efficient and practical, I think many employees and employers will want to choose this as an option. Being able to offer work-at-home as an option may make recruiting easier. Seattle-area traffic is now becoming an impediment to commuting, working from home as an option now is looking more attractive. Studies have suggested that that people working from home achieve about 70 percent of what they do working in an office. Others dispute this and say people get more done working from home. Suffice it to say that the results vary a great deal. We may need more employees or we may need to figure out how to make people more productive while working at home. From the employer’s standpoint, there are savings on rent and other facilities costs, bus passes, parking and more. When the office lease renewal comes up, business owners are going to need to think hard about this.
If you do intend to begin converting your company to become virtual or near-virtual, have you thought through how you will create a sense of ‘belonging’ for the company’s employees? How will you create and nurture your culture? Will you periodically get everyone together?
Given the challenges with getting supplies from China during the pandemic, will we decide to make changes to our supply chains, even if the source is more expensive? Will we choose to on-shore some things that were previously off-shored? And will we rethink just-in-time inventory and lean production to provide our businesses with more ‘cushion’ in case this happens again?
Will initiatives to automate processes be accelerated so that your company isn’t so dependent on people? Are there new service models available to you that you hadn’t considered before? For example, if restaurants are less popular, are there other models of providing food to people that might be tried?
With all of these potential changes, do you think you will be more competitive or less? Will you have more competition or less? Will your industry look different than it looked two years prior? Will there be fewer but larger competitors?
Do you think this will cause Americans to slow down at all? Will we become less of a consumer society? Might we decide to spend more time at home with our families? Take time to smell the roses? Buy less stuff because we’ve learned all that stuff doesn’t make us happy?
Naw, we’ll probably have learned little. But I think when we get back to normal, it will be a new normal; Covid-19 will have changed us and our world in ways we don’t yet foresee.
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