The onset and ongoing impact of COVID-19 has seen significant restrictions on movement and interactions between people on a day to day, even hour to hour, basis. Having gone from travelling 49 of 52 weeks a year in my business for the last 3 years to working from the home office, I have definitely felt the change both mentally and physically.
Over the coming days, weeks and months of isolation and, by extension, working home it is obvious that we (working from home workers) will get better at it. A question that has kept coming back into my mind though is this: is working from home already our new normal?
This question, I confess, has come up regularly in conversations I have been having with clients. Those conversations normally start with this question of me:
“Jeez you must be struggling (or enjoying depending on the client) not being able to travel???”
The fact is that my answer to that question is, generally, it is great to be home, I am privileged to have clients continuing to invest in my business and advice and I am getting used to teleconferencing / video conferencing as the new base line for interaction with clients.
Often discussions with clients move naturally onto their work at that point, however sometimes a follow up question (already after only three weeks) is put to me:
“You must be looking forward to getting back on the road?”
My answer to this question is much more succinct: “Absolutely not”. Setting aside my genuine enjoyment of not being in the Qantas Club at 4am every Monday, that is because a funny thing has happened over the last three weeks of working from home. Already I have been forced to realise that what once was a core offering of my business, that I will “come to you wherever you are”, may never be as in demand as it has been in past in a post COVID-19 world. With that reduction in demand naturally comes what is obvious: I will be working from home much much more.
This realisation arises from this immutable truth: As we are forced to move to different delivery platforms we are forced to adapt and, already, my clients (from construction companies to professional services firms and everyone in between) have adapted. With that adaption is the introduction of Zoom / Google Hangout / Skype for face to face meetings, heavier reliance on Dropbox for the provision of briefing bundles and more written advice rather than face to face workshops. More simply put: the introduction of delivery platforms that foster rather than disincentiveise working from home.
As this adaption (which is ongoing) has been implemented, that implementation has regularly been coupled with the statement:
“Why didn’t we do this sooner?”
Already then, with that statement, my new normal has become working from home. Clients are already preferring the new way we do things and technology will improve because the providers of it are going to need to keep pace with the new world we already live in.
Within this new normal, many businesses will either thrive or fail to survive. I have decided to write about my journey within this new normal here in a series of “Work from Home Diaries” traversing everything from technology to psychology.
Watch this space for more content. As always questions / comments welcome in this post or via email at stephen@thatparmaguy.com.
That Parma Guy 