Predicting the Future of Work: Re-imagining Corporations after COVID-19
Photo by Nastuh Abootalebi on Unsplash
By Betsy Tong, HiPower Ring 7
In the years after the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems obvious large corporate environments will be altered forever.
Right now the world is shutting down as fast as possible. Banning travel, sending work home, and mandating social distancing. Hopefully with more and more people complying we will flatten the curve and buy time for a treatment and/or a vaccine to be available in bulk.
When the world rights itself again, the way people work may need to change in a couple fundamental ways to rebuild and eventually thrive.
1. Fewer cubes and shared workspaces - Tightly packed open plan cube farms will feel like disease spreading danger zones. Anyone who has worked in one, knows how common illnesses spread like rolling marbles through crowded, airless environments. Employees may not want to return to that.
2. Meeting-heavy cultures decline - Large global corporations rely on large and inefficient regular in person/on the phone information sharing type meetings to get work down. Now that in person meetings are prohibited, new ways of getting decisions made will evolve.
What happens when work transitions from Virtual
Seems obvious that open floor plans will change either with more expansive cube spaces to maintain social distance, or cubes that have higher walls. People will feel safer doing remote work for a long time.
When I worked in high tech companies, one of the worst things was listening to someone a cube or two away blowing their nose or coughing. The sound always meant a number of cube mates would fall to the cold or flu.
Remote work will increase as part of the landscape as companies use this period to measure when and what face to face is actually required and what physical capital costs they can lose. Twenty-five years ago, there was a huge trend to reduce costs by shutting down corporate type offices and moving workers mobile. Technology today facilitates collaboration from any where and almost any device. Collaboration tools also allow us to mix and measure productivity in a way we couldn’t before. Now it is time to go further and change the habits of work that still dictate presentation heavy, in person meetings.
A friend of mine said her post COVID-19 development team is more efficient remote. Some of it comes from being able to get concentrated down time (albeit with pets and children or the refrigerator as distractions). She has deliberately constructed her team to be efficient, for example using a one hour conference call as water cooler talk time so other meetings can be purely business focused, and a slack channel for meme sharing.
How to make efficient decisions
Business and economic contraction to come will mean that fewer people will be affordable to do necessary work. Corporations won’t want to or be able to afford meeting heavy cultures - you know the ones where twenty or thirty people join a call and most of them are multi-tasking.
Trying to get a decision historically in a large organization can be like hiking through melted marshmallow. You meet to do the analysis. You meet to inform. You meet to align. You meet to decide. This process may take weeks or months of getting the right stakeholders in the right room or meeting. Sometimes a yes isn’t a yes because someone is missing, retracts or worse decides to revisit a decision was made months prior.
Even in the time of COVID-19, companies are still clinging to old practices. A friend of mine texted me a picture of her 9-hour conference call.... which was held on video and for which there was social pressure to have the camera on. Who is effective for 9 continuous hours on the phone?
Huge organizations will need to figure out how to make decision making efficient, and with fewer touches/sign offs by meeting. I serve on the Advisory Board for @CrowdSmart.io, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to help inform better investment decisions. The decision platform is deceptively simple - all information required to make a decision is shared online. Potential investors review this as self-study. Four questions are asked about strength of an idea, market, team and likelihood to invest of a broad set of investors. The platform looks for trends in the answers in making a decision to invest. The algorithm “predicts” better investment decisions and does it in an elegant way that allows wide input to be parsed into a conclusion. So much easier than the manual administration and program management involved in scheduling multiple executive meetings across a global environment.
Out of this period of unprecedented horrible, I am hopeful to see business transformation and how companies rethink the shape of work.
What do you think is the future of work for your business, at your company or for yourself?
Betsy Tong is a business architect who has spent much of her career transforming organizations for scale.