Have your co-workers become cheerio eating, screaming, napping tiny humans overnight? You’re not the only one. As spring of 2020 rolled in, the United States faced the start to change the workplace amid a global pandemic.
For many, this single time in history will go down as the biggest transition and most traumatic season of their lives. Businesses have learned to pivot to continue being successful and employees were forced to learn how to work from home.
As the workforce begins to find their new normal, many normalities of company culture, work-life balance and daily rhythms will change… forever.
Just as with the tragedy of September 11th, many of the shifts we’re experiencing from COVID-19 today will dissolve, and things will go back to the way they were without much notice. We’ll adopt the mindsets and postures we had before the crisis and the fear will slowly fade. But in other ways, COVID-19 will permanently change many portions of how we work.
We’ve rounded up just three ways we’re envisioning the future of the workplace:
Casual Fridays are a Thing of the Past…
Long below COVID-19 you may have been dressing in business professional attire each day and even during the start of WFH you may have been showing up to Zoom in heels. But as more time passes we all are getting comfortable with dressing comfortably.
Some businesses will forgo the stringent dress policies and others will slowly begin evaluating the need for such policies with offering a “dress for your day” policy where if you’re not meeting with clients, you can leave the suit at home.
We’re each going to have a Zoom account… the paying kind of account.
The developers behind Zoom, WebEx, Hangouts, Skype and other video communications tools made the grand WFH experiment possible. And for those of us who have been begging for more WFH days, this sort of video opportunity greatly aided in our hypothesis that WFH can be a huge win for companies.
Professional development is taking on a whole new approach.
As businesses grow employees are often given opportunities for extensive professional development. Amid COVID-19 these opportunities have gone virtual with online classes and video conferences.
While in-person conferences hopefully will make a comeback in the months and years to come, businesses are busy ramping up their e-learning platforms to ensure that their people were still building important skills and developing professionally.
