👤 Manoj Agarwal
10th January 2022
As the trending joke goes, it’s not the CTO or the CEO, but COVID-19 that has led to digital transformation in most companies around the world in 2020. Indeed, before the crisis broke, less than half of all companies even had a remote work program. Today, institutions and industries where #WFH was, at best, a misspelled slang, falling over themselves to decode and devise the right remote roadmaps. On the tech provider front, long rollouts are being accelerated to meet the sudden spike in out-of-office work.
And while there’s nothing funny about a virus that runs amok without a vaccine, there may be reasons to smile for HR and organizations after the dust has settled - depending largely on how they approach this change. It is, after all, the biggest to happen to the workplace since the Industrial Revolution.
And like all change, it drags along opportunity.
When authors suffer from writer’s block, they need a gentle nudge to get back to the plot. In a way, COVID-19 is that nudge for our transition to a truly digitally connected workplace - one that started some years back but has been in WIP mode for a bit long now.
Trends underscore the story powerfully. The rise of digital technologies has been getting more and more people to work remotely - not just from home, but from parks, co-working spaces, and while traveling.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-hfSPVAYLNmETwmH6HD3kt-BpeN8KuR5BM99eWjK6LYLjTikBbUNGDOr9w9dh7SzSrBJGseqkmKBtq3uBXWy7vs5SpKLd9M8SyzS-UaebW1C-v0zCNeOmq9cD0-bsg3W3gBQw0t8
95% of IBM’s workers are remote. According to Softchoice’s 2017 study Collaboration Unleashed, 74% of workers would be willing to switch jobs if they had an opportunity to work ‘off site’ more often. The ‘work-from-anywhere’ headcount has ballooned 10X (as compared to the rest of the workforce) since 2005. Kirill Tatarinov (CEO, Citrix Systems) had famously claimed that 50% of the workforce will be remote. Not even in his wildest dreams would he have expected that his estimate would turn out to be a conservative one (which in the #NEW NORMAL of 2020, it certainly is).
The corona crisis will finally force us to get off that fence and commit to a workplace that is not just digital, but more optimized and humane as well. The gig and freelance economy - where companies regularly outsource work to professionals they have never met in person - has been clocking healthy growth. Following is the profile of the 'new' worker as found from a recent study.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/WVyBin84A-AIeDgTvVPHte86GvQjg9BICAicTLsn0zcJQ631hxJCiuDWRND9DnPw-f5s7soGNoQSFjuK-fmaAMY799nMC4pou7PkwP9rgnWj3tUqGEsxC8-kEBtBvmWrM8hCzVbi
The huge popularity of collaborative work tools like Office365, Basecamp, Asana, and Slack tells us that people are getting comfortable with ‘social distancing’ in a professional sense as well. Empuls has been used as a primary office communication tool during the lockdown. Millennials and Gen-Z have been working ‘virtually’ practically their entire life and may wonder what the fuss is all about.
The #WFH tsunami is also a Litmus test of whether we have been doing our ‘People Strategy’ right all this while. For instance, organizations who have been able to bind their teams closer to a common purpose and engage them (with not only roles that are meaningful but authority and trust that comes without the micro-management) will experience the least amount of disruption - or bounce back the fastest - as work shifts from the office to the home. For others, the corona will mean revisiting the drawing board, this time with serious intent.