Tag: #pandemic

A Return to the Office…Kind of

Brad

Exactly 18 months ago on March 16, 2020, I left the office around Noon with a 24” HP Monitor, a docking station, and a collection of cords in my car. The Friday before, word was beginning to circulate that we might be sent home for an undefined period of time and by halfway through Monday, we were instructed to collect whatever items we needed to complete our work and to head home.

Never did I anticipate that working from my living room would be anything but a dayslong adventure. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Fast forward to 2021, and there was still no return to the office in sight.

At the end of July, I took an opportunity at a new firm where employees were a couple of weeks into splitting time between being back in the office and working from home. Despite my new preference of no commute and midday exercise breaks, it seemed only right that I would want to meet folks and get a sense for the new culture. After all, I had seen how new hires in my previous role fared when it came to learning the job, meeting colleagues, and establishing themselves. Some started and quit in the span of less than a year!

What I’ve experienced in the last month and a half working every other day in the office is, well, not what I expected…

My new boss works out of Ohio, his boss works in the United Kingdom, her boss works in N.Y.C., and her boss works in Washington, D.C. Stated plainly, no one in my chain of command works in my location. My colleagues are also spread out which means that there aren’t many people to interact with!

Now, this is unsurprising given that it is one of the largest companies in the world. My point in stating all of this is not to complain (the company is great), but rather, to offer a lens into some of the potential issues and headwinds facing corporations.

Leadership Lessons

  1. A return-to-the-office plan is most effective when management and staff are centrally located (only really an issue for big multinationals).
  2. When teams do return, the cadence of any split time should be based on geography, not by business unit. For example, if one team reports to the office every other day while the rest of the teams in the location are one week on and one week off, there won’t be very many people to see in person.
  3. Build Zoom rooms (again, large company problems) where employees can go when they need to join a meeting with others from a different location. It’s highly distracting to be in a meeting on Zoom where you hear that person over the Zoom call and in the cube next to you in real life.

Coming out of corporate America’s COVID hibernation was never going to be easy, and it’s especially unique for the millions of Americans changing jobs right now. My advice to you all…continue to expect the unexpected!

Share some of your experiences by commenting below or on social media.

Will the COVID-19 Pandemic Upend the Way We Do Business…Forever?

Brad

It’s 2:15pm, and you’ve just taken a quick break from work to check your phone. You open the social media folder in your iPhone, where you have applications like Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You open Twitter to check the feed for any important pieces of news you might have missed. The first tweet you see is something that someone you follow has retweeted, and instead of getting caught up on current events, you spend the next 30 minutes reading through the battleground taking place in the comments.

No, you’re wrong. I hate you.

That’s the takeaway you get from accidentally sinking so much time trying to figure out why unknown people from all over the country – even the world – are fighting to the virtual death over a fairly innocent tweet expressing a rather uncontroversial opinion or introducing a novel concept.

Now, imagine just two years into the future, and the overwhelming majority of corporate jobs are performed remotely. All communication takes place over company instant messaging platforms, meetings are performed over Zoom and the face-to-face interaction that has come to dominate the business world is effectively non-existent. What impact will that have on how we do business?

Social media, despite the demonstrable benefits that it brings, has also created quite the divide…will the same happen in the business world? What other surprising effects might there be?

Of course, no one knows what the future will look like in two years, but it certainly isn’t an out-of-this-world prediction that the move to online work will have a significant effect on how we interact. Humans are built to be communicative. We do that at our best when we are able to have conversations with one another, and really think about and digest what the other person is saying. The internet and social media have made communication easier, faster, and ubiquitous. There is no doubt…the effects have largely been borne out. The era of social media began more than a decade ago, and we now have years of history to examine some of the key effects. While some fields – most noticeably the technology industry – have had a remote-work capability for years, it was uncommon before COVID-19 for the broader economy.

Here are some of the key things to look for as we get deeper into this new decade, and business becomes less face-to-face.

Business from Afar

  • Employees often cite company culture as one of the biggest factors in determining where to work, and whether to stay. How will company culture – and by extension, employee satisfaction – be affected by little-to-no personal interaction? If employees become unsatisfied and turnover increases, what impact will that have on the viability of the company, and perhaps even entire industries?
  • Much has been said and written about when it comes to the rise of technology and its potential negative impact on future job creation. While a great number of jobs have been and will continue to be created as a result of technological advancement, the jury is out on whether there will be more or less overall jobs in the long-term. Will online work help us or hurt us?
  • If you can work anywhere in the world, why would you live where you live? I understand this question reads negatively, but really, do you need to or even want to be where you are if you are no longer required to be physically present somewhere? And if not, where would you move and how would you live? I’m sure this is a question that someone working in the real estate industry would love to have answered and is without a doubt a question they are already beginning to explore.

However, it isn’t just about real estate. Where people live is also where they spend money, and most importantly, where they live determines the way in which they spend money. For example, someone living in Florida spends money in service-oriented establishments (Disney, beach bars and restaurants etc.), whereas someone in Utah likely spends money on skiing and other forms of outdoor recreation.

In closing, the world will be different. That much we know. The rest is anyone’s guess, but it might just pay off to be thinking ahead.