2 Changes That May Remain With Us After COVID-19
COVID-19 has forced many people and organizations to try new things such as social distancing, additional offshore development, remote working, joining happy hour over facetime and even fighting for toilet paper at Costco.
Whenever major events occur they generally leave a long lasting effect and change society for the years to come. For example, the security measures taken immediately after 9/11 are part of normal airport procedures today, the constant presence of soldiers at Penn Station, a security measure adopted almost twenty years ago has become the norm as well. Besides a new vaccine or other medical advancements that may come as a result of COVID-19, what changes in lifestyle can we expect will remain long after we have abandoned social distancing, waiting on long lines for groceries or being glued to our devices waiting to hear the latest updates?
Remote Work
Many companies across the globe ranging from EY, Amazon, Marsh McLennan and many others have instituted work from home policies across many departments to prevent the spread of COVID-19 among their employees. However, working from home or remotely is nothing new! It was introduced the same time laptops and office chairs became household items, and and has slowly grown over the years but has yet to become a mainstream work ethic. Most employers still demand office presence from their employees, especially for the majority of the work week. COVID-19 may change all that and may usher in a workplace revolution across corporate America. The past few months truly demonstrates a compelling argument many major corporations can transition to a predominantly remote work force. David Arturi a Vice President at Marsh and McLennan Companies was always concerned that working remotely would have a negative impact on his team’s production due to the lack of interpersonal interaction. He believed the lack of such interaction diminished collaboration and the imaginative spirit that grows when ideas are bounced off one another. However, since the outbreak of COVID-19 and required stay at home orders, Arturi has quickly been forced to rethink his reluctance to remote working. He acknowledged that “technology and software makes true business continuity more achievable, thanks to the substituted digital collaboration.” He also mentioned that recruiting agencies have done a successful job with helping scale his team and hire new members all done without any in person interaction so far. Time will still tell whether other long-standing opposition to remote working will likewise crumble, however, it is clear that the beginnings of the old way of conducting business has forever been altered.
There is no better way for an organization to work remotely and collaborate remotely than by utilizing Nifty. Nifty enables inclusivity and cross-departmental collaboration throughout an entire organization. The Kanban task board enables employees to collaborate on tasks internally along with tracking time spent on each task so managers can have a clear overview of how the team spent its time throughout the week. Nifty also enables seamless collaboration with its user friendly product home screen that allows a team member to see all there notifications and “daily do’s” among: tasks, messages, docs, and milestone updates in one central location.
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The second industry that may be completely transformed is college education. The average student loan debt throughout the US is more than $30,000. The high cost for University comes with, expensive dorms, beautiful campuses and an abundance of staff. With many students and Universities being forced to pilot virtual learning and online classes, some online learning may be here to stay for the years to come. Mainstream Universities like NYU, and Purdue offering fully online undergraduate degrees in the near future can very well be the educational shift of the decade. It will create a more economical program for students cutting down the average student loan debt by more than half, while at the same time enabling students to have a more flexible online learning schedules as well.
Nifty is a great tool for online learning as well and continues to unite classrooms across the globe. With assignment prioritization students can view their daily, weekly and monthly workloads along with keeping on top of their cross-class assignments. Through Nifty’s resources students can create, collaborate on, and submit Google Documents Presentations within Nifty, and can reference class files to find information for specific classes as well.
Final Thoughts
Like every major event that occurs in one’s lifetime such as 9/11 or the financial crisis in 2008 they tend to make society stronger as a whole when they are finished. 9/11 lead to safer travel and commutes across the globe and the financial crisis lead to increased rules and regulations for wall street and stronger asset checked required for citizens to prevent mortgage defaults. It seems like COVID-19 will lead to remote work becoming the long awaited norm and online learning becoming mainstream as well.
Written by Jeff Kagan @ Nifty.
