We’re coming out of the pandemic and it seems to be happening very fast. For business owners, what’s next? The consensus is that the pandemic acted as an accelerant to trends that were already underway. What the pandemic did was accelerate those trends about ten years in the space of about 15 months. To me, that means that if you were running your business in 2020, and you probably were, and were asked what would change by the year 2030, you’d have a hard time answering.
Now, keep in my mind that 2030 arrives in July of this year. And the answers didn’t get much easier in the last 15 months.
But we did get some peeks at the future. Online retail jumped forward, to the detriment of brick-and-mortar retail, and that probably isn’t any going back. Telemedicine leaped forward at least a decade, mostly because the insurance companies started paying for virtual appointments. Take-out food became vastly more popular; we’ll see how much of that stays as people go back in-restaurant dining. Business travel decreased substantially and will probably never return to previous levels. Work from Home (WFH) is the big one. It became a way of life, enabled by Zoom and Teams, but how much of that will be a permanent change? This one really isn’t clear.
I think business owners should consider the learnings from the pandemic period and think about making changes to how they do business. Just going back to the way it was pre-Covid, doesn’t make sense to me. But there are no best practices. Every industry seems to be different, every company, even each person is different in how they approach what we’ve learned and what we should keep.
My Approach
I’ve developed an approach that I recommend when thinking about how to reinvent your business:
- Start with the customer and work backward through the value chain, eliminate things that don’t add value. If your customer doesn’t value you having an office, consider not having one. If your customers now prefer virtual goods or services delivery, keep offering that. Maybe make it your default delivery channel.
- Next, consider your employees and how they do their jobs; eliminate things that they don’t like. If they hate their commutes and can accomplish more at home, maybe never go back to the office. Finding skilled labor is as hard as it was pre-Covid. Do what you need to retain good employees.
- As you build your new way of doing business, make the new normal better than the old normal. This is the chance to take a giant step forward. Think big and be bold.
The Productivity Puzzle
The big challenge is the productivity puzzle. Some say productivity has improved by WFH. Others say people need to meet in person to be productive. There seems to be no consensus on what the effect is on productivity, probably because there is no general rule. If it works for some but not all, how do you custom fit the situation to each employee? Do you even want to try?
Innovation and Culture
Besides productivity, many believe that innovation takes place in casual conversations in the office. The serendipity of chance encounters or conversations is missing in the virtual workspace.
And how do you create and nurture company culture if your staff isn’t all in the office? Is it possible? If we’re clever, can we do it?
Some Examples
Next week I’ll offer some thoughts on post-pandemic offices, managing people virtually, company structure, and company culture.
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