In return for your many kind birthday messages over the past weekend, I would like to say I hope you and your families are all keeping safe. I’m sure it won’t be too long before we all return to some kind of normal. But what will normal look like?
Coronavirus is not the only reason working from home is becoming a thing. There’s a storm brewing, brought on by the simultaneous onset of this deadly virus and the increasing impact of the internet. Shops, factories and office blocks are closing in record numbers. Many, never to open again.
For years, we complained that city centres had become ghost towns after six pm. Commuters complained they lived too far away from work. Owners of retail and office-based-businesses complained their rents and council taxes were too high. And the environmental lobby complained our carbon footprint was damaging the planet as we clogged our roads with our daily commutes, and we poisoned the skies with jet fuel en-route to our budget holidays.
Millions of us have converted our bedrooms and dining tables into make-shift offices. We have discovered that actually, working from home isn’t too big a deal. The A to Z of the internet from Amazon to Zoom has helped with everything from home deliveries to virtual meetings. And we’ve discovered walking like it’s the Next Big Thing. Parts of our gardens are being turned into vegetable plots and our air is getting cleaner. I don’t know about you, but it feels as though my life is becoming a mix of Back to the Future and the Waltons.
You don’t need to be a futurologist to realise we are in the middle of a sea change. There will be little going back.
If we can work from home for six continuous weeks, many of us can work from home for a large part of our future working weeks. That will lead to a downsizing of office space needs, more hot-desking and consequently, lower office rent costs. Many offices and shops will convert to residential, breathing fresh life into our town centres, which at least helps makes a dent in our housing shortage. And the off-the-scale increase in home deliveries of everything from avocados to zucchinis will turn lengthy supermarket queues into a thing of the past.
We are seeing the popularity of organic food grow as shoppers become more concerned about the provenance of their purchases. The private equity market, (never far behind an emerging trend if there is money to be made) is investing millions of pounds in building industrial-sized greenhouses in the East of England. Soon, food miles will be measured from Ipswich rather than Iberia; Norwich, rather than Napoli.
China, up until now the global factory for just about everything, is going to pay a heavy price for this global recession when the world goes back to work. Localism will be in, internationalism, out. And there will be a repatriation of manufacturing to the UK on the basis that a low price isn’t much use if you can’t get it delivered on time from the other side of the world.
Staycations, until recently regarded as the poor man’s holiday option (but now increasingly the destination of choice for the thinking classes) will breathe more vigour into our seaside towns and villages, all desperately in need of extra trade.
A Change is Gonna Come: Partnership working will increase; top-down management cultures will decline. Businesses will need to work out how to combine the shrinking size of their physical footprint whilst increasing the size of their commercial influence. And, employers are talking about better and more effective online marketing; greater use of Big Data and shorter supply chains.
The thing is, life has always been about change, even though not all of it is planned. But necessity is the mother of invention. As we all know, it’s better to be one of the catalysts of change. Not one of the victims.
Andrew Lindsay
Representation UK
andrew.lindsay@representationuk.com