3 Possible Ways COVID-19 Will Change the Business Landscape
As the world continues to struggle with the challenge of COVID-19, many employees are now being encouraged to return to the office. There isn’t a singular solution that can be applied to all organizations, since much uncertainty remains. Despite this, we are already witnessing larger multi-national corporations (MNCs) make adjustments to how they are allowing workers to return to their previous mode of working. Tech giants such like Facebook and Twitter have announced a permanent policy of allowing workers to work remotely — even after the pandemic is over.
Working from home isn’t just a Western phenomenon, with organizations such as Indonesia’s Tokopedia beginning to experiment with remote work policies from mid-March. In other regions, organizations like Sony and Dentsu in Japan encouraged tens of thousands of their employees to make the shift to remote work as early as January.
Seeing as this is a fairly new paradigm for all parties involved, we wanted to take a look at 3 possible trends and predictions for the remainder of the calendar year in the remote workspace.
1. Hardware May Become More Expensive
This applies specifically to laptops but also mobile devices and tablets like iPads. During the initial outbreak in February, Japan’s Bic Electronics reported a 20% surge in demand for laptops. Over 70% of SME’s in Japan were unequipped for their workers to shift remote, and lacked the adequate physical tools to enable them to do so.
This trend was also seen in France, and was even more drastic in the UK as the City Council in Leeds had to source over 7,000 laptops over a single weekend. This comes at a time when production capacity is at an all time low due to Covid-19, and this may result in an increase in price for laptop makers as the entire supply chain has been affected by the pandemic.
2. Remote Work Legislation Will Be Passed
In 2017, France passed a new law that legally allowed workers to ask employers whether or not they can work from home without any repercussion or punishment. Fast forward 3 years later, and 71% of French workers now would like to retain the kind of flexible schedule they have become accustomed to during the pandemic. Evidence suggests that such legislation is also being considered in other countries. In Germany, lawmakers are currently reviewing legislation that would allow Germans similar entitlements to working from home, while in the US, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang advocated for a 4 day work week during his Democratic primary campaign.
Flexible work schedules can be a situation beneficial to both companies and their employees, allowing employers to lower overhead costs by as much as 70%, while workers save valuable commuting time that they are able to spend with friends and family instead. In a nation like Japan, where entrenched social and cultural norms prevent people from embracing remote work, legislation may be what is required to jump start this shift.
3. SME’s Invest In Digital
According to insights from McKinsey, German small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which account for nearly 60% of the nation’s workforce, can fully recover by 2028 as if the pandemic never happened. The only catch is that these SMEs will have to invest heavily into digitalizing their operations and innovation. While most of us see headlines of large MNC’s investing heavily into digital and online to offline (O2O) teams internally to stimulate innovation and research, most SMEs around the world haven’t had the resources or the time to do so. As a result, the pandemic has pushed many these SMEs, who are often the backbones of a domestic economy, to look hard in the mirror and adapt to the new modern era.
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