Is the new normal really that "new"?

A lot of discussions are ongoing around the new normal, how it would look like, what it would change in our lives, what the best way to adapt when world is getting back to its previous state, before the pandemic. There are multiple dimensions of it; financial, technological, social. They seem to be distinct from each other, but they are very much linked in deed.

The social effect seems to be the number one in the list to discuss in the new normal, as it is causing physical changes in our lives, work environments. Safety distance need to be maintained, the workspace need to be re-adjusted to accommodate staff, which leads to change in staff counts, and/or introducing shift-cycles in the working hours, so some of the staff would be in the office, and others will be at home.

The financial impact is a two dimensional equation, the operational costs on one side, and the revenue source (i.e. "customers") on the other side. For the brick & mortar businesses, lock-down and restrictions of movement surely caused businesses to lose huge amount of revenue as neither the business nor the customers could go out and continue their lives as they did before. On the other hand, it became a major issue for the companies to keep their staff and/or paying them the same amounts they used to.

Some companies chose to reduce staff, some chose reduce payments (salaries, benefits, incentives, commissions, additional packages, etc.), and some chose to apply both, for the sake of reducing their direct OPEX.

Reducing the staff introduced overloads on the employees and started causing deficiency, hence companies started looking out for ways to increase the efficiency by arming relevant technologies and IT solutions, which is the simplest introduction to digital transformation. Businesses (for the applicable ones) also needed further better solutions in place to continue day to day operations remotely (home office) so video conferencing solutions, additional security and relevant IT solutions, digital systems which had not been employed before but became essential for business continuity. Companies started to utilize remote-working as much as possible, using more digital tools for collaboration. Mobile access became more and more popular, webcam sales exploded, well-known video conferencing software providers (both for business and private use purposes) became richer as day by day the number of users increased by folds.

Even the world is getting back to its previous state on a slow pace by start working at the offices, still the necessity to have remote access tools, digital platforms and solutions in place is essential because of the social distancing requirements, and because of the negative financial impact of the pandemic on the businesses.

Yet, it is defined as the "new" normal. And that's where the question comes:

How new is this "new" normal?

For decades, online collaborations tools, video conferencing solutions, corporate VPN and data security solutions, enterprise mobile applications were in place and accessible, and the internet connection speed had been quite enough to access those systems remotely. Especially after 4G/LTE came into our lives, I don't recall anyone complaining about not being able to access to any service via internet or complaining about the speed as long as the ISP provided with a certain QoS and maintained the connection speed as promised.

The problem was, for 90% of the businesses, "bosses" did not want to entertain the remote working as they were so scared if it would be abused by the employees. They did not care about the inevitable daily cost of having people in the offices (furniture, electricity, water, cooling, heating, security, food allowance, travel allowance, and any mandatory expenditures arising by someone physically being present at a work place) for the sake of having a "closer" eye on what they are doing. Even the companies which went under digital transformation by employing many smart systems and solutions in place and inter-connecting them with a workflow, did not want such infrastructure to be utilized remotely but they wanted to see and greet their teams in the offices.

And now, all of such mechanisms, systems, solutions are widely enabled and being encouraged to, by the same guys who freaked out of them couple of years back. In other words, all the gems were kept in the safebox, but now it became essential to bring them out to the daylight and use them.

Did we really have to wait for such a pandemic to adopt to the digital and remote working principles? Did we really have to pay so much for the OPEX just caused because a lot of people would come and go to the offices everyday? Did we really have to ruin the nature by using transportation and emitting CO2 and lead? Did we really have to bear the inefficiency in our business by doing everything manually but not employing systems for that?

Considering those in mind, I guess it's not the "normal" which is "new". It's the "enlightenment" that and pandemic brought, leading all of us to re-discover that the world is round and rotating.

Lessons to learn

It's time to step back and look into what the pandemic taught (and still teaching) to businesses. Whatever we are doing right now to "survive" and achieve the business continuity was already available before the pandemic with more or less the same quality, the same features. The world would have been more "ready" to handle the impact of a pandemic and being have to stay at home, if companies had foreseen the positive outcome of utilizing digital access and business continuity solutions, and if they had already completed their digital transformation.

Yet, it's better start doing something rather than keep doing nothing.

I hope the pandemic will come to an end in the soonest time, but the lessons learnt would stay for a lifetime.