The Evolution Of Work – Forbes

The workplace is evolving rapidly and the pandemic gets the blame - and the credit.

Although we are still living with the Covid-19 pandemic, thanks to vaccines and masks, people are starting to get back to a normal rhythm of life. Kids are going back to school. People can eat inside restaurants again and many businesses are starting to let workers return to their offices. While some companies continue a level of cautiousness about welcoming their entire staff back to their workplaces, even those companies are signaling that by early next year, their staff will be allowed to work at the office on a flexible basis. Indeed, Amazon stated this week that their corporate staff could work from home indefinitely and come to the office as-needed.

Social scientists are just now starting to evaluate the impact of the pandemic on work, learning, and play. It may take a while to understand the full impact the Covid-19 pandemic had on all of us both personally and professionally. However, the one thing the pandemic has changed is how we work and the future of the workplace.

Had it not been for technologies like Zoom and other video conferencing apps, along with new collaborative software and services, much of our businesses would have struggled to be as productive as they were during the pandemic.

Jacob Morgan, who in 2014 wrote the book, "The Future of Work" and developed a concept he calls "The Evolution of the Employee" seems to have had a crystal ball of our current working world.

He created this chart below to suggest that employees and organizations around the world need to embrace, prepare for and encourage the evolution of the employee.

Jacob Morgan's chart -The Evolution Of The Employee

I don't think Mr. Morgan saw the pandemic coming but he points out that, "Covid has made this evolution a present-day reality."

One part of my job as a technology analyst since 1981 was to cover the evolving world of tech around the globe. Until the pandemic hit, I averaged between 50K and 100K miles traveling each year for 38 years. I have accumulated over four million airline miles during that time and I can tell you from experience that this much world travel takes a toll on one's body.

When the first whole room video conferencing systems debuted in 2000, I had a chance to use a couple of them where we connected with people from a company in other parts of the world. This was an "aha" moment for me as the reality of working with someone via video was now a reality. The only problem was that these conferencing systems cost over $100,000 each and were targeted at large corporations and not the mainstream market yet.

By 2010, we began to see a lot of what I would call small conference room video systems come to market in the $700-$1200 range and ushered in another important bridge to the use of video conferencing for all types of business. However, even though these new low-cost video systems worked, the market demand for them was paltry.

Office workers had engrained into their work-styles a view that face-to-face meetings were preferable to any type of video conferencing, and if traveling was needed to make these meetings happen, so be it.

I have worked with some Taiwanese ODM's in the past and always had to go to Taipei for my meetings with them. I had encouraged some of these companies to install these lower-cost video conferencing systems and on one of my trips, I brought a system with me and installed it in their board room. My goal was to try and reduce my travels to Taiwan as much as possible. But even with this video conference system at both of our sites, they were so used to in-person meetings, they resisted using them to the degree that did not allow me to reduce my travel to their offices.

Then the pandemic hit. All businesses were forced to find new forms of communications and collaboration to stay alive. Many technologies played a role in helping businesses weather the pandemic storm, but none had as great an impact as video conferencing.

If you look at the chart above, video conferencing software like Zoom, Microsoft's Teams, Google Meet, and Cisco's WebEx and others, have enabled work anytime, work anywhere, use any device, share information, collaborate, and democratized learning and teaching. Not bad for a 2014 prognostication.

Tragically, Covid-19 has killed nearly 4.9 million people worldwide to date.

Its impact on families has been devastating. It continues to be a serious health concern that some medical experts say it may never be fully eradicated although they also tell us it can be controlled.The heartbreak of deaths and economic destruction can never be minimized.

But it has also forced the medical and technical worlds to innovate faster. Weve had a Covid vaccine get to market in record time. Tech companies moved faster to expand their collaboration and video conferencing tools to help large and small companies keep working. And these technologies have upset the proverbial face-to-face meetings mentality and broke the resistance to using video conferencing that now allows people to work from anywhere, with any device, and create a new world where flexible work schedules will be the norm, not the exception.

We will look back on this era as one with heartbreak as well as driving positive changes, especially to the workplace. As Mr. Morgan suggests, "...employees and organizations around the world need to embrace, prepare for and encourage," this evolution of work as I sense the workplace has changed forever.

Originally posted here:

The Evolution Of Work - Forbes