The Next Pandemic
A Guide to the 21st Century Workplace.
Most of us are cresting some wave of coronavirus. For some it’s the first wave, for others, they’re paddling towards a looming second. At time of writing, there were even suggestions that the virus behaves more like a tsunami: an endless charging peak that is sustained and empowered by each subsequent wave that rolls across its surface.
So is now the time to be talking about the next pandemic? Certainly, there’s a significant body of research that suggests diverse zoonotic diseases are going to feature heavily on the playlist of our immediate future. Mers, West Nile Fever and Ebola are just three zoonoses we’ve faced down over recent years. A UN report published in July 2020 lays bare the potential risk our increased interaction with and proximity to wild animals poses. It identifies contributing factors including the increased demand for animal protein; a rise in intense and unsustainable farming; the increased use and exploitation of wildlife. Not to mention the climate crisis.
UN reports may not be typical breakfast reading, but with hundreds of millions of people working from home (WFH), if they’re lucky enough to be working at all, and actively doomscrolling their way through the working day, we’re suddenly reading the kind of information we’ve never needed to before. That novelty makes it doubly hard to sift through the noise. To separate information that is thoughtful and helpful from partisan screeds designed to uphold some political or economic point of view.
It can sometimes feel as though we’re being held hostage by two opposing teams, each of whom lays claim to our unyielding support, making it harder for us to figure out if this is a blip or a major re-ordering of society. It casts complicated issues as binary choices. Black and white. Right and wrong. Red or blue pill. And in doing so it vastly underestimates both the question and the intelligence of the audience.
“Society will change and adapt”
If we create a vaccine, if the virus doesn’t mutate, then bars and clubs and shops and beauty salons will return to normal. If we don’t, we’ll innovate and find ways to come together and socialise. The dance floors of the future may fill again with grinding sweaty bodies, doing the WAP dance in climate controlled hygiene suits. Only time will tell.
While our social lives may recover a flavor of their pre-pandemic normality, it’s possible that our working lives will never be the same again. That the workplace, as we know it, could effectively disappear. Despite all the talk of disruption, pivots and agility, companies are often far less dynamic and much more risk averse than we might assume. And the risk they’re currently most averse to is us, their workers.
Across the developed world, logistics chains have shown themselves to be remarkably resilient. Raw materials still make it from source to port to processor across thousands of kilometres of road and ocean to crossing continents. For the most part, we can still buy soup and soap and sandals and have them dropped at our door. The riders of this storm have been the low-wage delivery drivers and warehouse workers who have somehow been tasked with driving the global economy.
Technology has also, largely, held up. For years we’ve been told that the Internet is fragile and vulnerable to collapse. That huge chunks of Web traffic are bottle-necked through a frighteningly small number of gateways. In the past, we’ve seen entire nations disconnected for weeks after fishing trawler drag nets have cut trans-ocean cables. But, speed issues aside, our digital infrastructure has proved remarkably resilient, so far.
“With billions of dollars in collective business interruption costs, will it be a surprise if companies decide that they can’t afford to go through this again?”
Power grids haven’t failed. Water and waste management services have continued. Payment gateways have sent money from buyer to seller to lender. The cloud has kept information flowing. AI has provided insights. The machines have powered through. But a simple virus has stopped the humans from working.
With billions of dollars in collective business interruption costs, will it be a surprise if companies decide that they can’t afford to go through this again? That people are the weakest link in their supply chain? That they respond by devoting resources to replace their human workforce with more reliable machinery?
There’s nothing new here. If anything, it’s just traditional industries catching up with the start ups. Uber’s path to profitability looks reliant on replacing the human driver with machines. The company is a pioneer in autonomous driving technologies, partly because the driver is the most expensive part of the ride. Amazon has been an aggressive driver of automation tools across its business operations, including packing robots that have to be fed by people. AI and quantum computing raise the possibility of machine, rather than human, coded software.
“To Big Tech, human workers are a permissible endangered species.”
For smaller businesses, it might be an even more critical need. Without access to financial markets to raise capital, and deep-pocketed bankers to write new loans, theirs is a far starker reality in the face of this disease: one of survival. Why not embrace cloud and business automation services that are affordable and easy to implement? Chat bots can keep a business open 24 hours a day, funneling orders to third party fulfillment centers that handle warehousing and stock management on your behalf.
In the white collar world things are no different. Companies required to socially distance their staff have resorted to rotas and stay at home requests to entire departments in order to meet mandated distance requirements. While many lacked the digital infrastructure for consolidated offsite working before the pandemic, they have quickly made up for it, aided by video conferencing services like Zoom and the longer term reorienting of enterprise software suites like Microsoft Office towards online collaboration. Those firms will be looking to make good on their WFH investments.
Where this enormous experiment in business methodologies is heading is anyone’s guess. Other than there will be probably be fewer jobs on the other side of it. Cities may be redrawn by companies no longer seeing the need for fancy offices in fashionable locations. We may see more satellite and provincial offices, and service suites located near the CEO’s favorite golf course as central business districts search for a new role and presence in our urban lives.
“WFH is an opportunity to pass business overheads onto employees.”
Better still – from a commercial point of view – work from home is an opportunity to pass business overheads onto employees in the shape of furnishings, equipment, heat, light and communications infrastructure. Even if that workspace is a makeshift desk perched over the employee’s bed.
The more likely case is that company offices will shrink, devolving into co-share spaces, with workers rotating in and out as necessary. Teams are likely to become more geographically diverse, as virtual meetings are our concentration-sapping norm, and, as long as staff can work compatible hours, it doesn’t matter where in the world they’re located.
This is likely to have knock-on benefits for employers. Access to greater pools of talent without the need to upend those hires and their families and tempt them into already crowded and expensive urban centres, let alone jump through the hoops required to hire-in foreign expertise. It’s possible that this will have a revalitising effect on local economies that have not traditionally shared in the spoils of tech’s gold rush, and help to reverse or at least slow the brain drain that plagues many secondary towns and cities. Almost certainly, it will lower labour costs for companies who will no longer have to weight salaries against the inflated living costs of global business centres.
What happens next is open to question. It will take far longer for towns and cities to adapt to these changes than it will for companies to reduce their head counts and real estate footprints. How will governments, businesses and individuals react to the profound social, economic and political consequences that result? Have we reached that tipping point where innovation creates fewer jobs than it sheds? And if so, how will demand and consumption work in a world where an ever smaller number of people is employed?
COVID-19 will rightly be remembered for its devasting legacy. But future historians may also regard it as a catalyst, one that propelled us into a digital world for which we had no norms, no traditions and no rule book.