What Will Business Look Like a Year From Now?

No matter how far you scroll on any preferred social media platform, there is one common news items that dominates the day (well, besides the United States election, of course). For the past seven-plus months, the world has been inundated with the social, personal, and business ramifications from a global pandemic that has caused stress and disruption unlike anything we have ever witnessed in our lifetimes.

Back in the early days of the pandemic, I can recall reading an article in The Atlantic that laid out several scenarios for how the pandemic will “end” based on the world’s collective ability to test the infected, isolate and quarantine, and, perhaps most importantly, balance the delicate nature of both public health and the world’s pre-pandemic bustling economy. “Pandemics can also catalyze social change. People, businesses, and institutions have been remarkably quick to adopt or call for practices that they might once have dragged their heels on, including working from home, conference-calling to accommodate people with disabilities, proper sick leave, and flexible child-care arrangements,” wrote Ed Yong in what was the most-read article on The Atlantic’s website weeks after its publication.

The COVID-19 pandemic certainly has been, and will continue to be, a catalyst for change in all facets of human life. However, there is a stark difference between the happenings of today (mid-pandemic, cases rising amidst a “fall surge,” and several impending vaccine and treatment approvals looming) and tomorrow (vaccine(s) efficacy, widespread virus immunity, and a return to “semi-normal” business and personal life).

It’s incredibly easy right now to say that remote work is here to stay and will be the preferred way of office/corporate infrastructure. It’s also very easy to state that businesses will be better prepared for similar disruptions when a similar troublesome event occurs globally. If we look into a metaphorical crystal ball, what does business look like a year from now?

• Remote work is a permanent fixture for some organizations, greatly embraced by many others, and ignored by some. The conversation around work-from-home and remote work has been, often times, too front-and-center in business conversation. By now, we know that businesses that had the ability to enable their workforce to telecommute have done so for several months now, with some global technology brands even committing to this environment through summer of 2021, or, in some cases, permanently.
• Empathy-led leadership will become a hallmark of the businesses that maintained talent retention in 2020 and throughout 2021. The employee experience, or, as Ardent Partners defines it, the “talent experience” (to account for both FTEs and non-employee/freelance workers), has become a permanent feature of the “war for talent.” Simply put: the businesses that want to attract top-tier talent ensure that positive experiences, from the candidate journey to onboarding and through being productive, are the foundational baseline for its workforce. As workers deal with both personal and business disruptions (hello, home-schooling!), empathy-led leadership is perhaps the strongest catalyst for the best talent experience. When the economy is back to its rampant state and more and more businesses un-pause hiring strategies that were put on hold back in March, talented individuals will remember the overall experience of both how work was conducted and how flexible its leadership was during these challenging times.
• Businesses will be in the early stages of pivoting to “outcome-based” work. It’s not so simple to eschew the traditional 9-to-5 and time-based attributes of the world of work. For far too many decades, businesses have been more focused on the hours put into a project rather than end product or outcome. That will change significantly throughout 2021. While this pivoting transformation will not come easy, nor will it be quick, more and more companies a year from now will have begun the process of measuring performance on business outcomes rather than the traditional metrics that have come to define talent management benchmarks.
• Workforce agility will finally be paramount and achieved through enhanced workforce planning (and total talent intelligence). As far back as late January, businesses had an inkling that a pandemic was likely. Did they expect the level of disruption that eventually occurred, however? Not at all. The businesses that not only survived, but truly thrived during these unprecedented times were the ones that banked on workforce agility to get them through 2020’s extreme disruptions. Companies that had robust diversity and inclusion initiatives knew they could count on innovative voices to help them through the early months of the pandemic and continue to get work done. Businesses that bought into talent pools and direct sourcing could easily tap into specific skillsets and expertise as demand waxed and waned. And, most importantly: businesses finally understand that total talent intelligence was imperative in understanding how their workforce was situated across the world, the projects they were supporting, and having the overall ability to plan for various scenarios based on this knowledge.

Another crystal ball item oft-discussed in Ardent’s research and here on CPO Rising: the anticipated growth of the contingent workforce. As we experienced over a decade ago during the Great Recession, businesses were part of a “perfect storm” that saw both enterprises and non-employee workers truly understand the value of the contingent workforce, setting off its long track record of year-over-year growth. Developing truly agile staffing strategies today means accounting for a rise in non-employee talent and how it can contribute to a dynamic workforce that is able to respond to today’s challenges.

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