When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world in the first quarter of 2020, it caused a tectonic shift in how business was conducted. Every business organization had to alter its operations, from tiny ‘hole-in-the-wall’ outfits to large multi-national corporations. Some of the trends were already noticeable in the years before 2020. However, there was considerable inertia in adopting changes in operating style. However, organizations were compelled to make these changes to survive over the past two years. Having reaped a significant number of benefits due to adopting these changes, it is expected that business organizations will continue with them and apply their learnings to tweak their business models in the years to come. The following are key trends that will only grow in prominence in the coming decade:
Hybrid Working
If businesses had to stay functional in the past two years, they had no option but to facilitate remote work. This involved adopting the necessary technology and tools for online communication and collaboration. Not that such communication platforms were not used before 2020. Still, since the pandemic, businesses realized that they could be utilized to achieve a nearly equal level of collaboration among teams by being physically together under one roof. Having got a taste of the benefits of working from home as an option, the best talent will flock to companies that allow this privilege even after the pandemic is behind us.
Technology-Enabled Digital Transformation
As would be clear from the previous point, businesses would need to make extensive use of enterprise technology if they could have a hybrid working model. However, the deployment of technology need not only be limited to facilitating virtual communication. The adoption of software systems such as CRM, ERP, Content Management Systems, and so on was commonplace. However, in the coming future, companies will increasingly be forced to empower their employees to work even while being on the move by ensuring that their enterprise technology is compatible with smartphones. Moreover, we can expect that Robotic Process Automation (RPA) concepts would increasingly make manual intervention redundant for most monotonous tasks. Thus, every employee would be able to deliver higher productivity and would only be needed to work on tasks that necessitate human discretion to perform. Consequently, this would bring down the size of companies’ workforce. While businesses can surely expect to achieve cost savings through this, the employees that they would have on their payroll would be bound to possess a higher skill level, and therefore, the per-employee wage bill can be expected to move up.
Evolution in Productivity Metrics
Given that many employees would work remotely, at least for a few days of the month, the traditional metric of evaluating employee contribution, such as hours attended in the office, would no longer be applicable. Some companies attempted to overcome this by using facial recognition technology to detect whether an employee is at their workstation during operating hours. However, this could be seen as an invasion of privacy and generate resentment. Therefore, organizations would need to devise new metrics for evaluating the performance of employees that focus on the work output. Thus, you could track the time taken per project or task, the number of assignments completed by an employee each day, or the ratio of leads converted.
Once we emerge out of the pandemic phase and employees return to work, companies will have to decide how many employees to work together at one office. It may make sense for businesses to spread their workforce over different locations instead of having a few hundred of them working in a single large office. Thus, it can safely be assumed that the concept of virtual offices will grow in the years to come. Virtual offices allow businesses to expand their physical footprint in different geographies; they also help in enabling hybrid work. Moreover, virtual office providers may also offer the necessary technology tools to facilitate remote or hybrid work depending on the package. Virtual offices will thus enable organizations to build hyper-flexibility into their working models and, with the right kind of planning, can help enhance the sustainability of business operations.
test