25 Changes to How we Live and Work In a Post COVID-19 World

How we live:

 (1) Hardened homes. Top of the list is where we might have to spend all our time for extended periods. We’re going to aspire to save up for well-equipped home gyms, secure home offices, the highest possible Internet speeds, and extra freezer and pantry space. All that unused, showy space in McMansions will become more functional going forward. The emerging tiny-home trend will need to organize into tiny-home communities centered around highly sterile common areas. 

? (2) Away from cities. So many megatrends reports had predicted that urbanization was our future. But the black-swan event of COVID-19 will reverse that. News images told us cities are where you got infected — and had nowhere to go. Since many of us won’t need to be daily commuting into urban centers going forward, it’ll be easier to make that larger, more affordable, exurban, or rural place work out.

? (3) Settling down. Rates of marriage have been declining and the average age of first marriage has been increasing. But those of us who’ve found ourselves alone in an apartment have realized how lonely — and depressing — life can become very quickly. Maybe we’ll hack it out with our college roommates or families longer before we set out on our own; use online matching tools more intently to find that life partner with whom we can thrive during extended periods, and rethink the assumption that we need to ‘see the world’ and ‘get financially established’ before securing a lifelong companion.

 ? (4) Nursing homes. We’re going to try to keep our parents with us longer, rethink moving away from our kids, and rethink separating later in life — to avoid the heart-wrenching scenario of dying alone or being distanced from our parents when they pass.

? (5) Telehealth. We’ve discovered that there is a viable option to sitting in a clinic where everyone else is sick waiting for a doctor who always seems to be running a few minutes late. And that we can have wifi-enabled blood-pressure cuffs, temperature monitors, weight scales, and blood-draw devices to keep in our home. We’re only going to want to go into the ER, clinic, or hospital as a last resort. 

? (6) Online education. We learned that this can work and that our kids don’t necessarily need to attend a four-year college to launch into the next phase of their lives. College enrollments will be upended this Fall. But we also learned the limitations of this channel — that our children do need a kinetic supplement to it. Staring at a screen all day is an energy drag. Dual-working parents also saw very quickly that they need help to occupy the kids, ideally from a nearby parent or trusted neighbor. The education model is in play.

? (7) Favorite charities. We found existential meaning in charitable organizations — but saw how fragile they were to funding and staffing. We also saw the tenuous economic situation of low-wage workers in the restaurant, travel, hotel, retail, gym, beauty, and massage industries in our neighborhoods. We will shift our focus from national, cause-based giving to local, humanitarian services.  

? (8) Saving. Cash was, is, and always will be king. We were always told to put away six months’ of living expenses into an emergency fund. We were advised to live off of the income of one spouse and put the other’s into savings. But in reality, we got too overleveraged. It’s going to take a while to make this shift, but we’re going to take this advice more seriously without a doubt. ? (9) Investing. We watched the value of our 401ks evaporate, and others ‘buy the dip’ at the right time and make a lot of money when the market recovered. We saw interest rates plummet, and the prices of gold, silver, and cryptocurrency gyrate. The Fed pumped so many dollars into the system that inflation will inevitably come now. We’ve put it off too long — we’re going to need to get professional advice to weigh all these factors and protect our future.

How we play:

? (10) Smaller events. We already had in the back of our minds the threat of terrorist attacks on large gatherings. Now we have contagion and social distancing burned into our memories. We approach strangers in the public space with caution. We’ll definitely return to the tribal experiences of large sporting and concert events, but it will be awkward at first — and gradual. The smaller, local clubs and high school sporting events will feel more intimate and controllable. 

? (11) Neighbors. Those of us living in subdivisions and condos never got to know our neighbors more than when we were supposed to stay six feet away from them. Why? Because we were all home. At the same time. Taking our kids for a walk in the evening. We’re going to see the benefits of investing more time in these proximate relationships — because they could provide that needed support network during the next crisis.

? (12) Dining out. Many of our favorite restaurants won’t be back. Those who do return will have a different, more sustainable model. Overall seating capacity will go down and prices will increase. We’ll see more far-in-advance, prepaid, high-end reservations on the one end, and more pop-ups and food trucks on the other. In-home chefs and caterers may see a spike in demand to satisfy the burgeoning foodie appetites fueled during the last economic expansion.  

? (13) Yes, travel. Even though travel spread the virus and people got temporarily stuck trying to get home after it hit, this will be one of the contrary trends. People have not lost their desire to see the world. And they are pent up and have more unused vacation days than ever before. But instead of going to large urban centers for shorter durations, they may be game for more remote locations for longer stays. Demand for airlines, resorts, and rental properties may return faster than after 9/11.

? (14) Virtual reality. If we can’t afford to travel because we’re realizing we need to save, we’ll still want to escape and experience those locations — and be more open to VR systems than ever before. Getting away from flat-screen-based video games will also be a welcome change to our eyes.

How we work:

? (15) At home, mostly. The crisis has finally undermined two corporate workplace assumptions: that remote workers aren’t as productive, and that you have to be seen in the office until your boss leaves. The extroverts among us also experienced how strongly we need in-person connection. We’ve also seen how much more productive we can be not commuting back and forth, flying city to city, or running between conference rooms and campus buildings. Our default will remain in the home office. When we need to meet clients or reconnect with the team, we’ll find a temporary hoteling place in our neighborhood or urban center, but not necessarily always our corporate office.

? (16) Safety of larger employers. Employees of large, cash-rich companies in industries less sensitive to economic cycles never felt more thankful for their jobs and whom they worked for. My own CEO generated so much goodwill among the staff by publicly committing that layoffs would be the last resort, even while companies in our same industry were beginning to terminate lower-ranked staff. Workers of all ages may think twice before jumping to the start-up and look more closely at prospective employers’ balance sheets. 

? (17) Employers with values. You see what a person is made of when the chips are down — and we’ve all seen in clear relief that this holds true for our executive teams as well. We’ve seen countless examples of corporate leaders devoting their personal or company resources to helping those in need. These stories will be told in business schools and kept alive through corporate storytelling for the next decade. We’re operating on many levels in a global trust vacuum right now, and we’ll gravitate toward those who we can trust who have made hard decisions that align with our own values.

? (18) Rethinking contracting. Contractors are often the first ones cut when times turn bad, and the first ones hired when business turns around. They can make more money — a lot more — by taking on this risk. For many, the risks will have become too much and they will seek more secure employment. But for others who’ve had bonus reductions or been laid off, the path to contracting will shine more brightly. If inflation jumps, the pendulum will swing to contracting as the best way to adjust hourly rates upward to keep pace.

? (19) The next unicorns. The greater the change, for good or bad, the greater the opportunity. The optimists among us will run the opposite direction as everyone else — right into the wind. They’ll launch the next devices, platforms, and business models that will upend how we think about work and play. Some of them will riff off of concepts on this list.

How our companies organize:

? (20) Insourcing and onshoring. Many multinationals just experienced a traumatic supply-chain shock and realized how much their near-term revenues depended on smaller, far-away suppliers. And how little they had done to test these vendors’ resilience before signing them up. Multinationals will expand what they think is their ‘core competence’, bring more in-house, and regionalize operations. What is not insourced will be more concentrated into the hands of larger, multi-purpose vendors who can weather a storm.

? (21) Robotics acceleration. We saw the importance of distribution centers that get a lot done with a relatively small number of employees — and how quickly the whole operation can be affected when a disease takes down only a portion of them. With mandatory minimum wages already increasing, the break-even point for robotics has quickly arrived for many DCs. The era of human-less factories sending goods to human-less distribution centers via autonomous vehicles has squarely arrived onto the corporate three-year plans.  

? (22) Digital B2C acceleration. Business-to-business companies are accelerating their moves to business-to-consumer, and B2C firms are speeding up their all-digital plans as a result of the pandemic. They all saw how fragile and dependent their near-term revenues were on their distributors and their bricks-and-mortar stores. Everyone from consumer-packaged goods to banks will be competing to be one of the sixty average apps you keep on your phone. 

 ? (23) Remote work works, and is cheaper. Much of the work of Fortune 500 companies boils down to logic. Digital 1s and 0s that shape a product or service. We’ve discovered that the collaboration needed to create that logic doesn’t need to be in person in very expensive, downtown office buildings. But we’ve also discovered that home offices have variable levels of security and that call-center employees, in particular, do not have the same controls as they do in the phone-free, paper-free, biometric-controlled rooms as their contact-center buildings. Which new unicorn — or overhauled commercial real-estate company — will solve this business problem?

? (24) Workforce resilience. After 9/11, our companies made sure their IT infrastructure was resilient. After COVID-19, we’ll make sure our workforce is too. We discovered in so many large and small ways how much tribal knowledge still existed in a few employees, and how dependent we were on certain roles in order to keep revenues coming in. We found out how little we knew about who was and wasn’t set up to work fully effectively from home, and how many of our support processes depended on staff coming into the office. The workforce component will be the biggest new addition to our business-continuity plans.

? (25) Rethinking privacy. COVID-19 Contact-tracing apps will have everyone thinking about privacy. The sudden blurring of lines between public interest and personal self-determination has brought the esoteric topic of data privacy into so many ordinary conversations. Companies that put off a rethink of how they engage with both their consumers and employees on this topic will start to accumulate a ‘privacy debt’. 

Source: George Gilder & Jay Cline