Through all the conversations I have had with businesses over the course of lockdown, several themes are emerging, all of which in some way point to significant social change. The most obvious of these, of course, is ‘working from home’, which has become a necessity for most businesses and was enabled by IT departments at blistering pace. This however, is just the tip of the iceberg and the changes that it signifies. We have been in the grip of a digital revolution it seems for over a decade but when things started to go wrong this year, many businesses were still way behind the curve and some may never catch up. Others have been able to accelerate their programmes to great effect; more than one CIO has admitted to me recently that they have been able to overcome twenty years of technical debt in several weeks. This trend will deepen as we spend more time in our homes and the longer it goes on the more embedded it becomes in our culture. What does this mean for the future?
Working from home was once the preserve of the special case, the exception to the rule when I started out. The Global Financial Crisis was largely responsible for bringing WFH into the mainstream, as City firms and large corporates as well as small businesses, sought to reduce overheads. As communication technology improved, so did our acceptance of it as a means of doing business and so theses days, at least in leadership positions, the odd day working from home is a given. This crisis though is smashing through the last taboos of WFH. Banks are proving to themselves that they can still deliver with a distributed workforce and remain compliant. Call centres are coming back on line (literally), without the need for hive like communal spaces. Even my industry is learning that heads (and shoulders), can still be hunted, as long as you can see and hear them.
Norman Broadbent plc (LON:NBB) is a leading Professional Services firm offering five interrelated Talent Acquisition & Advisory Services: Board & Leadership/Executive Search, Senior Interim Management, Research & Insight, Leadership Consulting & Assessment, and executive level Recruitment solutions.
