On the second Sunday in March, I awoke at 6am to begin my typical pre-gym routine. Before rushing out the door, I quickly checked the status of my grocery store pickup (a post-gym ritual that helped eliminate one of many errands for the weekend), and hopped in the car to head to the Planet Fitness on the other side of town.

Just a week later, I awoke on a Sunday morning wondering where the world was headed as we began the first (of many) weeks under a stay-at-home advisory order with social distancing at the forefront. Our local grocery store temporarily paused its curbside pickup, and, Planet Fitness had closed.

So much has happened over the past three months that it can be difficult to sort out all our thoughts and concerns, let alone separating those into two piles: personal and business. Many of you, like me, have set a new record for consecutive days working from home. And many of you, just like me, will wonder what it means to cautiously wade into the summer months of phased reopening of metropolitan economies.

Pre-pandemic, the Future of Work was a movement defined by advancements in human capital management, talent acquisition strategy, innovation, and new technology, all converging to help businesses optimize how work was done. Today, many of the core tenets of the Future of Work remain unchanged, but specific focal areas have been altered as a direct result of a seemingly-transformed world:

• We’re past the “experimental” phase of distributed teams and remote work; if it’s not effective for a company right now, it may never be a viable strategy. When social distancing and lockdowns became the norm in mid-March, businesses across the globe were thrust into the “biggest remote work experiment” in history. Some organizations struggled and others flourished in this new environment. While the pandemic has certainly made an incredible case for more flexibility regarding work-from-home infrastructures, the long-term outlook doesn’t seem as cut-and-dry as it did when the world’s workforce was more broadly distributed. There are, frankly, many businesses that cannot effectively navigate trust and consistency within this new digital paradigm; these will be the organizations that revert back to the “old normal” when the time is appropriate. However, on the whole, hundreds of thousands of businesses learned that productivity and collaboration were transformed for the better over the past few months and will integrate more flexibility in how they structure their remote work setups. Expect businesses to shift a sizable chunk (maybe 8%-to-10%) of their overall workforce to a distributed model before mid-2021.
• The strength of the non-employee workforce shines. Heading into this year, nearly 80% of enterprises experienced an increase in the utilization of contingent labor in 2019. When the year is in the books, that figure could be even higher for the 2020 calendar year. Although businesses are beginning the process of reopening (albeit in a structured, condensed fashion to account for social distancing and state or city regulations), they will not be in a position to re-hire the scores of workers that were laid off over the past few months. Contingent labor will be a relied-upon source of talent and skillsets for these businesses as they begin to slowly ramp up and need reinforcements to get work done.
• Artificial intelligence and robotic process automation (RPA), already on the upswing, become even more critical in the face of tactical operational gaps. When faced with lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, businesses deemed non-essential had to close their office doors. This prompted a major gap in operational efficiency, as those companies with manual- and paper-based processes experienced incredible delays across a spectrum of functions. The power of AI and RPA has proven to be incredibly valuable as crucial enterprise workers were forced to execute major businesses operations from their home offices.
• The perception of the Gig Economy changes. The Gig Economy has been, for several years now, a major source of talent for specific verticals and industries. Today, gig workers have been the ones to help people and businesses weather the crisis, be it food and delivery drivers, grocery store workers, truck drivers, and other gig-based labor. This eye-opening shift in perception could finally be the catalyst for conversations on gig worker rights, compensation, benefits, etc.
• The Future of Work will become more “human.” On a personal level, many people have experienced a wide swath of emotions over the past few months. Too, many professionals have had to contend with becoming homeschool teachers and learning how to live/work amongst children who would normally be in school. Many others are dealing with emotions that are making it tough to completely focus on the business tasks at hand. The Future of Work must account for these major shifts in humanity, allowing for flexibility in both lifestyle and workstyle. Workers aren’t just skillsets and expertise, but are humans, as well. The Future of Work certainly runs on technology and innovation, but it must also become more “human” if businesses want their best and brightest talent to shine.

Be sure to check out the Contingent Workforce Weekly podcast for more thoughts and insights into non-employee workforce trends, Future of Work discussions, technology news, and more.

Tagged in: Artificial Intelligence, Christopher Dwyer, Complex Categories, Contingent Workforce, Future of Work, Innovation, People, Process, RPA, Solution Providers, Strategy, Technology