If you’re among the fortunate who are still employed, odds are you’ve been through a cataclysmic shift in some way at your job, whether you’re still going to the office or are working from home. You’re commute is faster, if you’re going to work. Your dress code is more relaxed if you’re at home. You might not have to wear pants.
Employers are also feeling the disorientation of a brave new world, exploring new ways of getting the work done with a staff who isn’t at the office. Are they getting as much productivity from staff as they had been before Covid 19 turned the world upside down? Is there a cost savings in having more employees work from home?
Sugar Land corporate consultant Joshua M. Evans says there is a learning curve for all parties involved. “Because there are organizations that never allowed people to work at home, and now they actually have that opportunity, and they had to make that decision quickly. What we’ll see in the future is more flexibility, and I also think there is going to be a huge focus on compassion and adaptability from leadership.” Evans says being adaptive is going to be a needed skill. But he says businesses are going to have to adapt to less team collaboration and less productivity as their staff adapt to the distractions of kids, dogs and everything else in the house.
“For the individual there are increased distractions, there is an increase in the blending of your personal and professional life for those who try to keep those separate. It’s difficult for people to actually learn how to work in these new environments,” Evans says.
Consultant Garrison Wynn says this is the time to develop skills that are going to be most desirable to post-Covid 19 businesses. Are you able to work productively under pressure? Are you able to meet deadlines? Are you reliable and dependable? And this is time for businesses to shape their post-Covid 19 image to be attractive to future employees.
We’re just in the early phase of the brave new world so it’s anyone’s conjecture of how this is all going to pan out. But it’s hard to imagine that after the magnitude of the shift in working conditions both businesses and their employees have experienced that things will return to the way they had been before.
Stay tuned.