(Part 6 of The WFH Report)

President Macron said “This is not a time for falling back on comfortable ideology. We need to get off the beaten track, reinvent ourselves, find new ways of living.”

Customers and colleagues have leapt forward in digital adoption, we’ve advanced years in months — and lockdown has been long enough to make many of these changes stick.

● Over a four-week period during the lockdown, 7.9m UK households ordered groceries online, up from 4.8m last year

● Online share of total retail sales increased from 5.4% to 7.5% between December 2019 and April 2020

● A Share of The Crop, a veg box supplier which sources produce from southeast England, received a year’s worth of additional orders during a single week in March. Since the coronavirus pandemic took over Britain, three million people have tried such a scheme, a YouGov survey has found

● Wine Insiders, an online wine retailer has reported an upturn in consumers looking to booze their way through lockdown — demand for chardonnay grew 11%, and average orders went up 15% in the second half of March

● Peach, an online luxury loo-roll brand, says its sales went up 267% in the first fortnight of March

● Cook has accelerated the rollout of its online delivery service, adding 14 vans to its existing fleet of over 35 over the past two months

● Following a 400% jump in online demand in lockdown, Holland & Barrett has opened a new distribution centre and taken on hundreds of new staff

● Ocado sales surged by 40.4% over March and April

● Downloads for “mindfulness” apps hit 750,000 during the week of March 29, a 25 percent increase from the weekly average in January and February — users also spent about 85 percent more time using those apps that week than usual

● Rapper Travis Scott held a concert within the virtual world of Fortnite attracting 27.7 million unique visitors and 45 million views

And more broadly than employee and consumer adoption, cities after C-19 will need to be bold and imaginative, rather than driven by old solutions. Spaces will need to be adaptable and smart. New kinds of building materials, agile construction, and new approaches to accommodation will need to be part of this future too.

5G, platforms, digital twins, sensors, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things — all these technologies will be all the more important, and they will have to be deployed in support of a complete rethink of urban life, life in cities after COVID-19, where norms like social distancing will be the new normal.

As for the future of work, we believe that the transition will be slow. Unlike when lockdown happened — it was almost like a switch was flicked and that switch can’t be unflicked as quickly. Office readiness alongside employee confidence in commuting and being around people again will take time. Even when this confidence returns, people will question whether they want to spend a big proportion of their day travelling. Businesses will question whether they need the space. And as we head deeper into recession, companies will begin restructuring in light of what they’ve learnt during lockdown.

This combined, it will bring a seismic shift to how business gets done. We’ll learn to live in a much more blended or hybrid (as some people are referring to it as) world of work. We’ll become experts at switching between channels; digital, face to face and good old fashioned phone calls depending on the need. It will become flexible working rather than purely remote working.

Facebook is taking it one step further. Facebook’s vision for the future of work emphasises the impact virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) may have on the way people connect and build relationships. Synthetic 3D experience will replace the reality of commuting and sitting at a desk in a shared space. This will not imply, though, a loss of productivity or efficiency, says Facebook.

“We envision a dynamic virtual work environment anchored by genuine social presence. Next-generation devices would give people infinite workspaces with configurable virtual screens, whiteboards, and other visionary tools. You could work alone or collaborate in a persistent meeting room with remote coworkers like you were all sharing the same physical space, and with all of the nuance of in-person conversation.”

Back <Meet Kayley and Lisa (Part 5)

Jenny Burns is an Executive Partner at Fluxx. check out The Innovation Starter Kit. 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.