How the Coronavirus may Accelerate the Future of Work?

The world has been suffering a lot lately. From Australian bushfires, economic slowdown to the rising coronavirus outbreak, the future of both living species and business organizations are at a stake. According to Roy Morgan, an Australian market research company stated that nearly a quarter or approx. 26% of Australian businesses were affected by the bushfires.

The National leader for economic and social analysis with SGS Economics and Planning, Terry Rawnsley said ‘Sydney suffered a whopping amount of $50 million loss for a day Sadly, the GDP had to face a downgrade of a near sum of $1 billion. An estimate of nearly $2 billion from the nation’s GDP will also suffer a loss of 0.15 % as per the calculated numbers.’

Percentage of Businesses affected by the Australian Bushfire

Yes, we are talking about accelerating our work and the future of work forever. With so many losses that the global economy has been suffering from the past few months, the businesses are adapting to newer workplaces. Henceforth, most of us are keeping our hopes high on positive results.

Changes in technology and rising economic conditions are the major factors responsible for escalating the future of work.  But as we all seek to know, the predictions in work are still paradoxical. These predictions need to be converted into realism for getting greater outcomes.

The global economy has widely affected the business continuity and weaker trade. Even the manufacturing department has slowed down its service sectors.

According to the IMF, as per their 2019 research, global economic growth got lowered by around 0.5% in 2019 and 2020. Moving further, the IMF has estimated a drop of 3.3 % in the GDP for the year 2020. Talking about the assumptions, they have also lowered the further results to be somewhere around 3.4% in the year 2021.

Global GDP lowered in the previous years but a moderate recovery is expected in 2021

When all of this took a backstage, now we are facing a global pandemic (COVID-19) that has shattered the existing global peace to a huge extent.

After a major loss of human lives and government measures to lockdown countries, the world is prioritizing humans and their health in the very first place. But this has led to companies facing huge financial disruption as well as downgrading the business sectors globally.

Amidst this quarantine, the organizations have started adopting changes that were to be made in the future. Most countries are adopting the practice of working from home through live chats and video conferencing.

With such an initiative, there will be fewer chances of losses and travel costs. Aside from this, the workflow can be accelerated in similar ways. If simply put, the adverse effects of coronavirus seem to speed up the digital transformation, thereby changing the prospect of major business workings.

Work Reinvention and Acceleration

The pandemic has provided the world and the businesses a lesson that they can flourish even when the staff is not physically present in the offices. When most of the work can be done from home, the folklore of commercial losses and complete shutdown can be put to rest.

With this, customer behavior in different countries including China has majorly been altered. It showed no harm in accepting digitalization.

Yong Zhang, CEO of Alibaba stated that the eCommerce business had huge growth, that too around 17 years ago. With the growth of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) they believed that the consumers and businesses can benefit from that adversity. It would bring more business opportunities to the world. He also added that more customers would shift to the digital means for buying their daily needs.

When the US declared a lockdown in the country, the organizations slowly but steadily started practicing work from home. They were more precisely following uncompromised productivity and maintaining social distancing at the same time.

States like New York, California and others have strictly warned their residents to stay at home and maintain complete social distancing amid this epidemic.

After China, the US also stood with reinventions and more accurate work practices and profits. Here are some of the positive points showing the need for remote working.

a) The increased use of automation assures acceleration to increase the workforce and better work practices in the organizations.

b) Travel expenses will soon be questioned as less human presence will be required in the offices. This will be a win-win situation as the employers won’t require paying for travel and compromise on productivity.

c) HR will face huge changes and complex HR departments can use their time for better purposes. Since there will be a lesser number of people in one room, the need for human resource investigation and research is expected to decline.

d) Commercial real estate prices are bound to fall due to this epidemic. Work from home or remote working is in the game, which will likely leave fewer options for the organizations to spend more on complex commercial grounds.

The chief executive officer at Twitter stated ‘It’s difficult to say if we can go the same way as we used to operate’. We also agree with her, if the outcome of the benefits and the disadvantages, why would human existence need to work the old ways.

While the world is adjusting itself, it is a great opportunity for organizations to adapt their existing policies and embrace their work even more with such practices.

1. Telecommuting and Unknown Access

While more and more employees are granted permission to work from remote locations, organizations need to be a little careful. They should adopt policies that include instructions and benefits of the same. The policies requesting, using, obtaining and terminating access to organization network, systems and data should be explained to the employers.

2. VPN Usage

As remote working grows, the security and safety of the business data, systems and network should be the primary concern of the organizations. They should provide proper guidelines to ensure proper deployment of VPNs and other policies stating the use of company-issued devices.

3. Disaster and Risk Management

Natural and man-made disasters can destroy operations and it is important to ensure that the operations run smoothly at hard times. The companies should have risk management policies to handle threats. They should ensure proper cybersecurity or any form of data loss or data dereliction.

Being optimistic, we can only wish to have the best survival strategies and counting the growing progress doesn’t look vague. As human resources and conditions are the focus in between this COVID-19 outbreak, the organizations are flourishing and the practices that were to be implemented in the future are revised today. Like the world has faced disasters before, it will still survive and the outcomes are likely to be positive.