For a very long time we are talking about the value of digital transformation, e-commerce and all the new developments that the technology is bringing to us. Working in technology domain; I have the luxury of embracing new trends early and being an early adopter. Perhaps I am blessed and cursed to have the opportunity of working with remote teams for more than a decade.
Let's try to think about what this pandemic has changed at our work life and how did we react to it? As human beings, we react every change at our environment. The majority of people started to adopt to lockdowns. We have upgraded our work corner of our house, perhaps upgraded from kitchen table to a better desk and perhaps with a more ergonomic chair. Wifi repeaters, internet speed, webcams, ... upgraded. After the physical equipment upgrades we adopted to online grocery shopping, and of course more and more e-commerce. We have worked all these months from home, and forced to get used to it. This pandemic and the effects are as big as a world war, we all accept it but on the other hand it has forced a paradigm shift for people. One question I have been asking to myself for some time is; why do people work, learn, live with the rules of Industrial revolution which required 9-5 mentality for industry; while living the era of Information revolution? Nothing happens in a day, this change is not happening in one day as well, and yet the pandemic also doesn't make it happen in one day.
One good example for the transformation is shown at EU stats that the home office employee contracts increased x2.4 times from 2019 to 2020 in Europe. This forced transformation also proved that there is a mentality shift as well. We are all now evaluating whether we can use our time efficiently when we are in the office and the perception of efficiency is also changing.
The necessity of being physically in a place (office) is, we cannot get that thing done remotely. We are questioning the reason of being in an office, physically. Why should I go to office if I will sit in an office all day and attending to meetings? Why should I go to the office if I can complete same tasks from another place?
The mentality shift is also effecting the perceived value of some corporate positions and companies start to question the organization charts. Yesterday's "robots are stealing our jobs" is now "Slack, Teams, Confluence are stealing our jobs". Think about a traditional hi-tech company (I am surprised that i started to use hi-tech and traditional at the same sentence nowadays) where you have all these middle managers, the human being information highways, who work to keep different teams/departments in a company synced. We are using new or old collaboration tools to do this now and as we are working remotely, adding value to your company is not being organic information highway anymore.
Fast forward to a time where covid is all under control. What would we do? Do we just pretend as if nothing has happened and continue old style? We are now adjusted ourselves, norms, values to new way of working. Perhaps this pandemic pulled the trigger to shape our lifestyles again and get rid of all the artifacts of industrial age. Do you now recognize how similar the Industrial Age and Information Technology Age are? Remember few generations ago that people's working location changed from farms and houses to factories; we reshaped our life style from being farmers to workers and adjusted to a 9-to-5 lifestyle, started to have an early breakfast, even the meaning of breakfast/lunch/dinner is changed by industrial revolution. The same change is happening again and we are re-shaping our lifestyles, once again.
Our workspaces do not exist anymore. We are not the workers of industrial age. As we all consciously or unconsciously are in the middle of the next cycle of changing and shaping our lifestyles, the essential tools in our toolset are also needs to be upgraded and i believe this is also the reason of mind blowing speed in moving from web2 to web3.