(Part 2 of The WFH Report)

We’ve heard from our study participants that the outbreak of the coronavirus has transformed how their businesses operate, with the majority forced to transition to a remote working model with little preparation. Employees are performing their roles from their domestic environment, and as well as having to adopt new technology, security has become a much larger challenge as well. It’s not just home working though, according to our participants, there has been a boost in e-commerce too.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, referred to “two years of digital transformation in two months.”

This digital acceleration — both collaboration tools and e-commerce — has left almost all of the companies our participants work for considering how much office space they’ll need in the future, if any at all. Companies like Twitter, which let’s be frank were already ahead of the flexible working curve, have announced that “employees will be able to work from home forever”.

However, more traditional companies are finding things a bit more challenging. We’ve observed that before the crisis, homeworkers tended to be older, hold more senior roles and were concentrated in sectors like IT, professional services and real estate. The lockdown has widened the age range and skills of those who work from home. Some service sectors like retail, education, entertainment and healthcare have adapted rapidly in order to continue operating.

Consider, for instance, the almost wholesale adoption of telephone consultations with GPs or the doubling of online grocery purchases. In May, Microsoft announced that it now has 44 million users of its Teams platform globally, compared to 13 million users in 2019.

For some businesses productivity, and profits will suffer as operating models designed for a pre-C19 world adjust to social distancing and enhanced hygiene standards. But in the long term an acceleration in technology adoption, and a necessary reorganisation of work, would raise productivity. The UK’s poor productivity performance partly reflects a “long tail” of low-productivity firms that do not implement the organisational changes required to exploit technology. The lockdown could be a catalyst for some to change.

We are witnessing what will surely be remembered as a sudden and historic deployment of digital access to services and remote work across every domain, including education, entertainment, government, medicine, and retail. And even as we see hopeful signs of economies slowly reemerging, we can only anticipate that more and more services will undergo further digitalisation as the work-from-home population remains mobilised.

Visa recently reported that in Latin America, the number of people using Visa credit cards online increased by 20% (13 million people) in one quarter. This means the pandemic and resultant economic recession is likely to advance how technology supports creating solutions for broad societal issues:

• Inequality — especially via better access to broadband and financial services and banking
• Renewable energy — harnessing solar and wind energy to power the data centres behind the cloud
• Increasing the capacity of the healthcare system cost-effectively — technology can monitor a patient’s health at home while telemedicine can help to treat the sick at home

Next > The Dawn of a New Era of Leadership (Part 3)

Back < The World’s Biggest Work from Home Experiment (Part 1)

Jenny Burns is an Executive Partner at Fluxx. We help companies like Condé Nast,Thames Water, HSBC, and Addison Lee Group, bring big ideas to life. Check out Fluxx Studio Notes for more stories. Stay tuned with all that’s Fluxx by following us on LinkedIn or signing up for our WTF Newsletter. Get in touch at Jenny.Burns@Fluxx.uk.com.