The New Workspace and the Cloud: Adapt or Die in Post-Covid Work
The 4 main trends
First trend: Cloud computing is exploding.
Second trend: Maximum security is now completely automatic.
Third trend: No worker without a desk.
Fourth trend: Companies reinvent themselves. The forms of business as well.
What we already know
We know that the pandemic, COVID 19, will disappear soon. We also know that many of its consequences will stay.
The pandemic has given a strong boost to remote work, which was already a trend in recent years. Cloud services, e-commerce and home delivery platforms have changed our way of buying and of relating to sellers. We have even had to get used to new forms of payment.
A recent study by McKinsey & Company suggests many changes in the way we understand work, our relationships with our bosses and colleagues, with customers, and even with courier employees.
According to this study, the probability that jobs are transformed is directly related to the degree of physical proximity necessary for their development. For example, sectors such as healthcare, hospitality customer service or travel are the most exposed to personal contact. The study places the public service workers that we find in commercial establishments, banks or postal services in another group.
In all cases, nothing will ever be the same again. Diagnostic and follow-up apps serve numerous patients, minimizing the need to travel to a medical center. E-commerce and home delivery applications have multiplied so that you can buy everything you can imagine, from your favorite sneakers to your birthday cake.
Much of the international travel of executives has turned into long video conferencing sessions on Skype, Zoom or Google Meets. Many companies have reduced the space of their facilities, others have moved from the city center to the suburbs. It is estimated that around 25 percent of employees could work from home at least three days a week. This means multiplying by 4 or 5 the volume of remote work, from before the pandemic.
The difficult times of lockdown have led to surprising discoveries in labor matters. For example, in tasks that can be done remotely and by one person, employee productivity increases. This is not the case when it comes to negotiating a contract, making strategic decisions with the management team or choosing a profile for a position of responsibility.
But there’s no stopping this trend. After the experiences of the first pandemic months, many companies have made changes in their working methods, reduced the size of their offices and organized their staff around three new categories: remote, face-to-face and hybrid. In a study published in 2020, Gartner predicts that 48% of employees will work remotely after the pandemic compared to 30% before COVID 19.
And… what about consumers? The people confined to their homes found ways to manage the situation. Crowds of e-commerce and online activity lovers have sprung. About three-quarters of users who subscribed to digital channels during the 2020 crisis plan to continue paying their fees “when all this ends”.
All this explosive growth in digital activity is going through the cloud. The landscape after COVID 19 is full of things to do: new web page formats, online stores, telematics applications, logistics, industrial, financial, health management programs … And all of that will be, it already is, in the cloud. In this scenario, more and more companies are betting on ubiquity, to be everywhere at once. All your computer applications, management programs, office automation; in other words, everything is installed in the cloud, with access from anywhere in the world and from any computer. And the data always protected, yes sir, with maximum security.
Let’s take a closer look at the main trends in this devastated post-COVID19 scenario and which has the cloud as the main protagonist.
First trend: Cloud computing is exploding.
During the pandemic, many companies were forced to adopt workspace solutions for their employees to work from home. Now, in the race to reduce costs and improve results, cloud services are going to experience spectacular growth. The key is in its flexibility, accessibility and scalability.
Second trend: Maximum security is now fully automatic.
Some observers have highlighted the demand for security, and how human participation in it is minimized to an extreme that was inconceivable until recently. Users no longer have to worry about it. Security applications that incorporate artificial intelligence avoid errors, waste of time and prevent malicious attacks.
Third trend: No worker without a desk.
Before the pandemic, 80% of workers did not have access to digital tools to do their jobs. Since 2020, many of them already have a telematics desk that allows them to do their work better. According to surveys carried out that same year, around 70% of workers without a telematic connection considered that this connection would allow them to improve productivity.
Fourth trend: Companies reinvent themselves. The forms of business as well.
The race for survival has already begun. The senior staff of a company may no longer be in a luxurious office in the heart of the city. What is certain is that all its members have come to the same conclusion: that to move forward you have to make big changes in the company. They are evaluating their decisions in terms of flexibility, speed, agility. They are willing to accept a certain flattening of the hierarchies to provide the business with a better response capacity in all circumstances.
Much of this business turmoil is due to the emergence of new forms of business that, in reality, are not that new. Online stores, commercial websites, e-commerce or healthcare applications have discovered new dimensions of service during the COVID 19 restrictions. They are already being transformed with new technological contributions, such as artificial intelligence or big data.
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