15 minute read
Waking Up to Our Post- COVID World
from zzz
Andrew Bolwell, Global Head of HP Tech Strategy and Ventures, explores how we are entering a decade of consequence that will shift how we live, work, and play.
A year ago, the world was just becoming aware of a virus that would disrupt society on an unprecedented level. Since that time, the pandemic has made us rethink how our children learn, how we work, where we shop, and, most significantly, how we take care of ourselves and one another. It’s turned our lives, businesses, and world upside down.
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As we move forward, we anticipate the impact of COVID-19 will be far-reaching and lasting, requiring us to take a fresh look at trends impacting the global economy, public health, education, and the future of work.
ANDREW BOLWELL The future of work
The rapid spread of the virus forced businesses to transform overnight. While some people have returned to the office at least part-time, infection spikes and new variants have companies assessing if remote working or a hybrid model—combining remote and co-located work—should be adopted permanently.
COVID-19 will continue accelerating the transition to remote work and transforming the workplace. A 2019 survey of remote workers from Buffer found that just 30% of their companies had fully remote workforces. Fast-forward to 2020 when most US companies had shifted nearly their entire “nonessential” workforce to remote as
COVID-19 spread. Many employees hope this will continue. A PwC survey found that 74% of office workers would like to work remotely two days a week or more, even after the pandemic ends.
This could be a substantial benefit to companies, as remote work can lead to productivity gains and savings. In a survey covering the United States, Germany, and India, around 75% of employees said that during the first months of the pandemic they were able to maintain or improve productivity on their individual tasks. Even on collaborative tasks with coworkers, or
40%
of employees
are expected to utilize a remote-working model in the future
SOURCE: BCG
20%
of remote workers
say their biggest struggle is around collaboration and communication
SOURCE: BUFFER
84%
70%
84%
of workers
would like to work remotely at least one day per week
SOURCE: PwC
70%
of managers
are now more receptive to remote work arrangements than they were pre-pandemic
SOURCE: BCG
interacting with clients, more than half of respondents said they were able to maintain or improve their productivity.
There are also potential cost savings. A typical employer can save about $11,000 per year for every person who works remotely half-time. Employees who choose to work from home at least half-time could save between $2,500 and $4,000 a year, thanks to reduced transportation, parking, and food costs.
Even with those benefits, there will likely still be times when collaboration, development, training, and corporate culture require us to gather in person. Microsoft announced a flexible workplace option, offering most of its employees a combined work-from-home and work-at-office model. Twitter, which adopted a permanent workfrom-home policy during the pandemic, has mentioned using its office space postpandemic for meetings and gatherings.
This will require new ways of thinking about space, interaction, and safety. Flexible spaces with movable walls, common areas and pathways designed with social distancing in mind, spaced-out offices, team pods, private working areas, and testing and temperature stations will need to be factored into retrofitted and new office designs. Employees will need to be healthy and feel safe when they return.
Reduced-occupancy meeting rooms and elevators, rapid diagnostic tests, upgraded air filter and filtration systems, cleaning protocols, hand-sanitizing stations, and social-distance directional signage will all be part of our “new norm.” To help organizations structure phased returns, tools such as ReRun will be used to calculate how many people an office space can safely fit and where they should sit. ServiceNow introduced apps focused on employee-readiness surveys, health screening, workplace safety, and personal protective equipment.
We believe the future of work will be a hybrid model, and the role of the office will become a place to facilitate teamwork and group activities. This will drive the need for solutions to enable employee productivity, cooperation, and engagement, wherever they might be.
2
5 1 3
4
100
minutes
Time saved with a telehealth visit compared to an in-person visit
SOURCE: AMERICAN WELL
1 in 5
emergency room visits
could be avoided with the adoption of telehealth
SOURCE: MCKINSEY & COMPANY
The future of business
COVID-19 has accelerated the digital transformation of many businesses. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in April, “We have seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”
One example is the acceleration of automation, through technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI), to drive process and workflow automation, customer service efficiencies, and enterprise-wide cost savings.
RPA and chatbots are ensuring business continuity across industries despite the huge spike in claims and queries related to COVID-19—particularly in the travel, leisure, entertainment, and hospitality industries. A major airline built an RPA “bot” in just six days that was able to address 80% of cancellation requests, or about 4,000 per day. That amount of work would typically require around 200 fulltime employees, and the RPA solution costs 30% of what it would cost to hire them. Around 55% of major organizations plan to boost their investment in automation solutions this year.
RPA spend is forecasted to reach $25 billion by 2025 (compared with $3.6 billion today), and by the end of 2022, 85% of large organizations will have deployed some form of it.
An economy is being created where companies will compete not just based on the value of their products and services, but on how successfully they’ve become a digital-first company.
The future of industries
The manufacturing industry has already had to respond to COVID-19 with more automation. Social-distancing requirements are leading to the rapid adoption of remote diagnostic, management, and collaboration tools. A control-tower view of data across the whole manufacturing operation may become standard, with an accelerated deployment of Industrial IoT, including sensing, data visualization, and AI-based insights across their operations. The shift to smart factories will be accelerated, and manufacturing will also require a digital-first approach.
Retail has also depended heavily on technology and automation to weather the pandemic. US ecommerce sales shot up 25%, with egrocery sales doubling during lockdowns. Buy Online, Pick Up in Store services (BOPIS) have surged, with 40% of retailers now offering the option, compared with just 25% last year. Big retailers have opened automated mini-warehouses and are setting up “dark stores”—buildings that look like supermarkets but are closed to customers—to meet the demand for deliveries and pickup orders. Going forward, consumers will be able to switch seamlessly between online and offline shopping experiences, all connected, with relevant buyer data at every touchpoint.
COVID-19 has also amplified the need for digital health transformation. Telehealth visits have increased 50- to 175-fold, contact tracing apps are on the rise, and datasharing policies are being reevaluated. However, no areas have been pushed further into the healthcare spotlight than diagnostic care and research. As the world raced to develop vaccines, new tools and solutions were put into play. New technologies have allowed for accelerated testing and research, and diagnostic testing challenges will continue to be a focus of ongoing innovation. Microfluidics advancements—the ability to manage fluid at the micro level—show great promise in expediting the development and use of molecular diagnostics. This could lead to scalable, accurate, rapid pointof-care testing that would allow us more flexibility to resume our normal lives after the pandemic.
The new normal is digital
These shifts are ushering in a world of digital-first businesses and industries, transforming how products are made and sold. We will soon be living in a world that, but for the pandemic, might have taken years, maybe decades, to manifest, and it is critical that everyone can thrive in this new digital reality.
At HP our mission is to create technology that makes life better. This means not only continuing to digitally transform ourselves, but to also support our customers, partners, employees, and communities in their efforts to do the same, while helping bridge the digital divide to ensure everyone can benefit.
It’s important to remember the future hasn’t happened yet—we get to create it.
+652%
-77%
+652%
Increase in online bread machine sales
March 2019–March 2020
-77%
Decrease in online luggage sales
March 2019– March 2020
3
23 Up to million Americans could move due to remotework opportunities
in or near cities, as were the services needed to fill them, such as transportation, housing, and food. The suburbs were defined by their proximity to cities, and homes were places to return to at day’s end. So what if, for wide swaths of the working populace, that no longer applies?
A Gallup poll released in October revealed that 33% of job holders in the United States were always remote and an additional 25% were occasionally remote. Major tech companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Slack have told their employees that working from home is now at least semipermanent, and other institutions such as universities and hospitals expect virtual instruction and care to be standard offerings. A PwC survey found that more than half of all office workers—55%—would like to work remotely three days a week or more, and fewer than one in five employers want to return to the office as it was before.
This disruption has resulted in a remote-worker migration where up to 23 million people could move in the US alone and a labor shift that is setting off ripple effects across industry, real estate, and government. In industry surveys, workers in fields like tech and finance say they’ll ditch expensive cities such as San Francisco and Seattle. Meanwhile, 15% of 3,300 tech workers sampled who were living in the Bay Area have left. And those who move are more than twice as likely to settle in less dense regions with lower housing costs.
Cities like Burlington, Vermont; Bend, Oregon; and Butte, Montana, have become Zoom Towns, with swarms of new arrivals in recent months. Farther afield, remote workers are also moving to places like Somerset, England, and Western Australia. Even India’s Silicon Valley in Bengaluru (also called Bangalore) is emptying out. If an area has reliable Wi-Fi , a connection to nature, and good transportation links to larger hubs, remote workers are flocking there.
REMOTE WORK has been on the rise for good reason. Before COVID-19, the cost of living in the most expensive US cities was around 40% to 80% percent higher than the national average, a trend mirrored in global capitals like London, Paris, and Tokyo. Smaller municipalities such as Tulsa, Oklahoma, were already luring big-city residents with more space, cheaper prices, and offers of grants and coworking space. The trend isn’t new, but “this past year it has been on steroids,” says Prithwiraj “Raj” Choudhury, a professor at Harvard Business School who focuses on the future of work and wrote about the shift recently for the Harvard Business Review.
In 2020, large numbers of workers, restricted from going to the office, began to take a harder look at their home, work, and outdoor spaces. Just 36% of homes in US cities like New York City and San Francisco have a spare bedroom for an office. Choudhury, who advised Tulsa and is helping the local governments of Venice and Cape Town attract remote workers, says, “This has really become a national and international phenomenon.” The acceleration of trends by the pandemic has shifted remote-worker migration into hyperdrive.
So what does this mean for the towns people are moving to?
Danya Lee Rumore, a professor at the University of Utah, says “gateway communities” in the Mountain West—smaller towns that are located close to a national park or ski resort and have populations of fewer than 25,000, like Moab, Utah,
or Jackson, Wyoming—were already seeing increased visitation and growth. Now this movement of people to places for recreational reasons—called “amenity migration”—has taken off.
In recent meetings with corporate leaders, Rumore learned that they expect between 50% and 80% of employees to stay remote, many of whom hold six-figure salaries. “What does it do to a community when the average income of a local employee is $40,000,” she asks, “and all of a sudden, you have a mass in-migration of people who have average incomes of $150,000?”
What happens? A sort of small-town gentrification— and, inevitably, an increase in prices. In Flathead County, Montana, for example, monthly real estate closings nearly doubled in 2020, and the median home-sale price jumped almost $50,000 in five months.
Rumore, who launched the Gateway and Natural Amenity Region Initiative, says some communities have tools to ensure equitable growth, like zoning and ordinances, but she is worried about towns that aren’t prepared for such an influx of new residents and the
25%
are occasionally remote
SOURCE: GALLUP
SOURCE: PwC
strain it will create. “Rural development experts said this year we’ll be where they expected us to be in 15 years,” according to Rumore. “Once [the towns] get discovered, they start to have big-city problems”—like congestion, unaffordability, and infrastructure constraints.
If Zoom Towns want to retain these new residents and keep local ones, they need adequate infrastructure (increased tax revenue can help with that) such as reliable broadband and power, and farsighted city planning. Bhagyashree Pancholy’s remote work consultancy All Remotely helps companies migrate their workforce online. When COVID-19 hit, she was researching how rural communities across her home state of Rajasthan, India— already a favorite destination for expats—could gain remote workers. “The access to stable, fast Internet connection was a real problem [for all workers],” Pancholy says. “But I also had this problem in the middle of Iowa.”
Stefan Palios, a journalist and consultant who specializes in remote work, is moving himself—from Toronto to Windsor, Nova Scotia. He advises town planners to take stock of the amenities they offer, such as affordable housing or great natural vistas, then be proactive, and not to take a perceived urban exodus for granted. “What can you offer that nobody else can?” he asks.
BURLINGTON, VERMONT,
IS 100 MILES FROM MONTREAL’S INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT AND 200 MILES FROM BOSTON’S. NEARLY ONE-THIRD OF THE POPULATION IS IN THEIR 20s.
NO MATTER WHERE remote workers end up, the workfrom-home structure has been normalized. “In two years’ time, after this big experiment of working from home, are they going to start pulling people back into the office?” asks Andy Rhodes, HP’s Global Head of Commercial PCs. “I think there’s been enough change that we’ll remain in a hybrid mode.”
This return of sorts to an uncentralized workplace has merits and challenges. “The biggest positive is that you can choose where you live,” says Choudhury. And if employees are remote half the time, they can pocket up to $4,000 a year, thanks to less money spent on commuting, parking, and that $13 downtown lunch. They also have more time to spend with loved ones, exercising, or socializing.
Employers win, too: Businesses can minimize their physical (and carbon) footprint, but maximize their recruiting reach and hire talent from anywhere. Companies can also save up to $11,000 a year for each employee who works remotely at least half the time. And they can also reduce budgets on business travel and airfare, hotels, and events, and—if location is no longer consequential—opt for smaller, less expensive office space.
Remote work also has the potential to prevent brain drain. “Scholars like me have studied the phenomenon of smaller towns losing talent to cities, or emerging markets losing talent to the West,” says Choudhury. “Now that talent can come back.”
Just
36%
SOURCE: HARRIS AND ZILLOW
BEND, OREGON,
HAS THE MOST SUNNY DAYS IN THE STATE ON AVERAGE—AROUND 263 A YEAR. IT ALSO HAS ONE OF THE LONGEST SKI SEASONS IN THE UNITED STATES, RUNNING THROUGH THE END OF MAY.
But the wherever office isn’t without pitfalls—ask any worker juggling children, homeschooling, pets, and shaky Wi-Fi. Traveling from room to room to avoid noisy kids, leaf-blowing neighbors, competing video calls, or sunlight has become the new business travel. This new micro-mobility means workers must have the right tools for success. “How does technology enable everyone to give their best self when they are working remotely?” asks Rhodes.
According to Rhodes, it takes up to 23 minutes for workers to regain focus after a disruption while remote, and caregiving or other responsibilities could create “second-class” employees who are at a disadvantage
due to their living situation. Companies will have to rethink their relationship with employees, one less centered around a physical place and more aligned with the new work-life pattern. Experts say that some of the daily disruptions synonymous with this past year will subside as in-person activities resume. Yet the struggle of isolation will persist.
“How do we drive a more engaged workforce?” asks Loretta Li-Sevilla, who heads Future of Work and Collaboration at HP. “In the office, it’s taken for granted that you’re always connected, but when you’re working from home, that becomes a challenge.”
Experts like Choudhury and Li-Sevilla suggest more informal video huddles, virtual water coolers, and flex days, which would allow remote workers to socialize or meet management in a more comfortable setting. Companies should consider opening up localized “hubs” in new growth areas, which would serve a more social, rather than utilitarian, function.
For companies, the key is creating new rules of engagement that ensure work—whether it’s individual or collaborative, in-person or virtual—is inclusive of everyone, no matter where they are.
“Now, as we see this whole distributed work environment, it’s really tied to what’s most important for people and an individual’s needs, versus the employer and their needs,” says Li-Sevilla.
“There’s a shift going on,” she continued. “More power is in the hands of the people.”
