The
COVID-19 pandemic is set to realign the world’s social and economic
structure, and fundamentally change the way people work and interact,
personally and professionally. While the current social measures in
place around the world are aimed at stemming the spread of the virus,
there’s a good chance that there’ll be a residual adoption of elements
of them as humanity adapts to ‘the new normal’ – because the world will fundamentally never be the same again.
Hundreds
of thousands of people are set to lose their jobs as economies tank –
but the optimistic view is that that’s an opportunity for the future,
rather than the very real catastrophe it feels like at the moment –
particularly in the SME space. It’s a rare economic situation that sees
major corporations struggling as much as SME’s, and the upshot is that
people may have to create employment opportunities for themselves and
others, rather than returning to the jobs they had before the pandemic.
It’s
clear that the world will need more entrepreneurs, whose smart ideas
can help rebuild economies, create employment opportunities and
re-establish – and rebuild – the livelihoods of entire communities.
Time Saving
Many
have glibly asked ‘could that meeting have been an email?’ – but the
reality is that the working world is rapidly discovering the benefits of
finding new ways to address business needs, that rely less on physical
face-to-face interactions. Catching up as a group on a Zoom meeting is
important, but cutting out a commute, the niceties of the preamble to a
meeting and repeating yourself for the guy who stumbled in five minutes
late has made meetings more efficient and to-the-point.
Meetings
won’t go away, because humans are collaborative. It takes one person to
have a great idea, but it takes a team to realise and implement it –
which is why co-working spaces will remain an important part of life for
those taking up the challenge of employing themselves, and others by
forming SME’s, in the new world order.
Decentralising Operations
The
shift in ways of working has also shown that decentralisation is
possible – something that may become a necessity in the future. All
those shiny offices in global centres are expensive line items on the
annual budget, and since budgets are going to be way tighter – if not
non-existent – in future, even SME’s may have to make peace with the
fact that not everyone needs to share a space. And knowing what we know
now about how easy it is to spread viruses in close-contact working
spaces, there’s a convincing health argument for decentralisation, too.
If
an SME team is driven enough, nobody will have to worry about
clock-watching or ensuring that people are doing their jobs by having a
manager stalking the halls and peering over cubicle walls. There will be
essential functions that rely on being physically present in a space –
but there’s no reason that different functions of a business can’t be
split across different spaces, cities or even time zones to maximise
efficiency and save costs. And with flexibility of working time now
becoming an option across many industries, that demand will need to be
catered for by SME’s and other employers, in the future.
Greener Business
Building
more efficient spaces has been an important global trend over the past
few years as companies realise the impact their business has on the
planet. What about the environmental cost of getting people to that
office every day, and of business travel? Cutting out the commute for
the global workforce has already had a noticeable effect on the
environment – fake-news dolphins in the canals of Venice, aside – so now
that we’ve proven it’s possible to decentralise or work remotely, why
not continue that?
Carbon
monoxide emissions in New York have been slashed by 50% over the past
few weeks – mostly on the back of reduced road traffic – and an analysis
by climate website Carbon Brief indicates that the shut-down in China
has resulted in a 25% drop in energy use and emissions over a two week
period at the height of the pandemic there, which is set to lead to an
overall drop of 1% in the country’s carbon emissions for 2020. As
industry ramps up again around the world, emissions will rise once more,
but those numbers do illustrate the significant impact a reduction in worker commuting, can have for the planet.
4IR Creating Opportunities
While
there’s plenty of concern that the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)
is going to cost millions of jobs, it’s also set to deliver millions of
opportunities and plenty of efficiencies.
Robotic
Process Automation (RPA) can take over manual, repetitive tasks – but
instead of making the people in those functions, redundant, it frees
them up to tackle more important and non-automatable tasks which can
improve business operations. The global economic crisis means that
efficiency and multitasking are going to become the order of the day –
something the lean SME space is used to, to an extent. Embrace
technology and let the people who are the heart of your business focus
on helping you re-establish it and re-invent it. It’s time to innovate.
While
things are set to be very different, there’s a huge benefit to
collaboration to establishing and maintaining a dynamic, agile business.
Entrepreneurs and innovators thrive off being able to kick around
ideas, sense-check decisions with others and find ways for
seemingly-unrelated companies to work together to deliver unprecedented
opportunity – and there’s nothing the world is going to need more than
opportunity, once we come out the other side of this.
