What Will Work Look Like in 2022?
Will Remote Survive IRL?
Unforeseen Consequences
Pandemics, natural disasters and crises in general tend to have consequences beyond the obvious death and destruction. A hurricane can cause infrastructure damage that affects the economy and mobility in a city a decade later. Climate change brings animal and human populations in closer proximity, opening more avenues for disease spread.
In the mid-1300s, the Black Death killed somewhere north of 75 million, possibly up to around 200 million people. It’s an almost impossibly high number, 200 million — equivalent, in today’s terms, to the population of Western Europe. That kind of seismic shift in the population, naturally, had effects that lasted far beyond the end of the plague itself. For example, workers in the post-plague economy experienced a massive boost in wages and working conditions. Why? Because there were so few of them to go around. The supply and demand curve swung heavily in favor of labor, at least for a brief period of time.
Owing to modern medicine, and technology’s ability to keep us at a distance, the COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted only a tiny fraction of the pain caused by the Black Death. But it has already caused major shifts in the economy and labor relations. Most obvious, of course, is the surge in remote work. Two-thirds of employees are currently working from home, for better and for worse. To accommodate remote work, companies have had to digitize all kinds of business functions that once occurred in physical space: conference rooms replaced by conference calls, security guards by security software.
While nobody knows exactly how the world will shape up when the pandemic has passed, history suggests that the workplace won’t completely revert to its 2019 state — that this crisis, like others before it, will have unforeseen consequences to business that last years and decades on.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
A Case Study in Technology Adoption
For a model of how business might respond to COVID-19 long-term, we can look back ten years to Iceland — or, rather, what was bubbling underneath Iceland, and then exploded very violently over it.
When Eyjafjallajökull began to spew hot lava in March, 2010, the media called it the perfect “tourist” volcano. The eruption was hardly eruptive, and hikers could walk nearby to witness a small pit of convulsing lava that posed no real danger.
That changed on April 14th when, after a brief pause in action, the volcano finally erupted, spewing massive amounts of ash into the sky. Around 800 people were evacuated from nearby towns at risk of flooding, but what became bigger news was the situation in the skies. In the week that followed April 14th, around 100,000 flights were cancelled, over 10 million passengers affected. Over 300 airports in Europe were forced to close, and billions of dollars in damages followed.
At peak, around 30 percent of all air traffic in the world was cancelled as a result of Eyjafjallajökull.
The situation in the sky was bad but, on the ground, it was arguably worse. Lines at airports became mobs. With customer service phone lines tied up, social media flared with #ashtag and #getmehome. One Norwegian man summed up the situation to the BBC:
We can actually smell sulphur in the air here now from the volcano cloud. This could last for a few days apparently, so all I can do, like anyone else, is sit and wait.
Not only was his flight cancelled — he was told by his airline, in no uncertain terms, to “not bother calling for updates.”
Jochem van Drimmelen, Corporate Content Manager at Norwegian airline KLM, recalled what it was like to handle customer service that week.
Soon our call centres, ticket offices and transfer desks could no longer handle the huge stream of inquiries coming in. Desperate for information, many stranded passengers and their friends and relatives decided to turn to social media — Facebook and Twitter in particular.
As social media picked up, Drimmelen began tweeting to customers. But it was hardly a company-wide effort — at first, it was just Drimmelen on his phone. KLM had little of what we’d today refer to as a “social media presence.”
I recall many evenings when I would sit on my couch at home with my smartphone, share information and answer questions on the @KLM Twitter account. At the same time, we ran a short pilot study with this blog and set up a Facebook page. We were pretty much learning by doing [. . .]
Having just one or a few people handle the entire company’s social media presence was difficult those first few days. But, counterintuitively, it was as the ash began to dissipate that the situation became truly untenable. Martijn van der Zee, KLM’s Vice President of e-commerce, explained in an interview years later that:
[T]he real issues for us started when we were allowed to fly again, which was on days five, six, and seven. We had the situation where everybody wants to fly again, but 95% of seats are already taken.
That caused a kind of tsunami in communication. There’s no other word to describe it. It was a bombardment of people trying to reach us through airports, call centers, and the Web. Our website can handle a lot, but it could not handle that number of people reaching out.
Traditional methods of communication became bottlenecks. Phone lines couldn’t handle the volume, nor email. But social media could lighten that burden. Desperately, the company shifted their resources.
A team of some 150 volunteers from different departments started working around the clock, helping thousands on Facebook and Twitter to continue their journey ASAP. Those were crazy days. We got little sleep and basically lived on pizza deliveries and takeaway Chinese.
It was like discovering petroleum for the very first time. Many airlines were, all at once, discovering a power they never realized they had. KLM, SAS and even EuroControl, Europe’s air safety organization, provided updates to grounded passengers throughout the crisis, answered questions and resolved concerns, and, when the skies were clear again, helped re-book tickets.
Lessons from a Crisis
Crises shake things up. In the mid-1300s a plague reshuffled the power dynamic between labor and the ruling class, if only for a brief time. In 2010, a volcano eruption forced airlines to reorganize how they did customer service.
This past year, COVID-19 has once again demonstrated just how powerful our technology is. We’ve known for years that it can help us in our work, but it took a pandemic for the world to realize that technology, all on its own, can substitute or even supplant a lot of what we used to do in-person. It turns out we never had to do meetings in a conference room, or collaborate on projects by being anywhere near one another. Evidently, plenty of the little, day-to-day functions necessary to keep a company moving have a corresponding solution in cyberspace.
But that’s not to say we’ll all want to remain remote when the pandemic is over, or that it will make business sense for most companies, or that, even if we wanted it and it made business sense, we would handle the transition gracefully.
Eyjafjallajökull was a big, fat notice for Europe’s airlines: that Twitter and Facebook could fundamentally transform their relationships with customers. But even after it saved them in a crisis, not every company immediately invested in social. van der Zee recalled:
The funny thing is that, after that kind of situation, you go back to normal. What that effectively means in a large company is that everybody goes back to the silo: marketing, sales, service, risk.
It took three months for KLM to process what social media might mean for the company’s future.
[T]he CEO was so fed up that he said, “Well, Martijn, you organized it during the ash cloud. I don’t care which department does it. We just have to organize and match it in the same way.”
Even at this point there were issues — new considerations the company had to consider, like running multiple accounts in different languages. Over time, though, those kinks were worked out.
As COVID-19 recedes, we’ll probably experience an awkward transition period like this. We’ll return to the office in some capacity, and stay at home sometimes. We’ll try things out and see what sticks. But after enough time has passed, we’re almost certain to land on a better paradigm that we could have even conceived of before the pandemic. Crises tend to do that — they force us into new situations, new ways of thinking. Drimmelen summed it up best, recalling how a crisis forced his company to be better:
Very simply, there was no way back.
This article was published for EnjoyTech Web. For more information on third-party risk, visit www.enjoytechweb.com.
