Nations have been mostly focused in the near term on surviving the massive disruptions caused by Covid-19. But what about the longer term? What will the post-pandemic new normal be like for societies and economies? More specifically, how will the pandemic impact the world of business? As Rahm Emanuel said in a 2008 WSJ interview: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
“The future is not what we thought it would be only a few short months ago,” said a recent McKinsey article, From Thinking About the Next Normal to Making It Work. “As businesses step into the post-coronavirus future, they need to find a balance between what worked before and what needs to happen to succeed in the next normal.”
The article offers 21 concrete recommendations for succeeding in the next normal, organized into seven major areas. Let me summarize a few of these recommendations.
Organizing for a distributed workforce
Working from home may well have succeeded during the pandemic because it was viewed as temporary rather than permanent. But corporate cultures may well erode over time with mostly remote interactions. Newer employees, in particular, may feel isolated rather than part of a kind of extended family, an important attribute of a well-functioning organization.
Companies should take the lead to redefine what the workplace now means, including how to best organize a more distributed, remote workforce, where it works well and where it does not. Properly organized, remote work “could contribute to building a more diverse, more capable, and happier workforce.”
Remote work can, for example, help companies draw on a much wider talent pool, make work more accessible for people with disabilities, and offer much needed flexibility to parents and caregivers. But, if not properly managed, working from home will exacerbate work-life balance and burnout issues. Office life has relatively well defined boundaries. But when your home becomes your workplace, “It’s not so much working from home; rather, it’s really sleeping at the office.”
Post-pandemic, companies should lock in those practices that helped speed up decision making and execution. Agile methods are a prominent example. Surveys have shown that organizations that embraced agile practices to better respond to fast changing technology and market requirements, have performed significantly better than their counterparts. But, only a minority of companies have done so. The pandemic has now forced many more organizations to embrace agile practices, and for the most part, they have seen positive results.
Similarly, “collaboration, flexibility, inclusion, and accountability are things organizations have been thinking about for years, with some progress. But the massive change associated with the coronavirus could and should accelerate changes that foster these values.”