After the Deluge: Business World in the Post-pandemic Era

The pandemic, having swept across the world like a tsunami, seems to be under control finally. Finally, there is some glimmer of hope that things can settle on a new normal, if not go back to the normal. Floodwaters are subsiding, laying bare before our eyes a landscape, parts of which are recognizable and some, totally alien. What does this new normal spell for the business world? Here is a list of 3 big transformations taking place in the business world nowadays:

1 - Hybrid work becoming the norm

Once the lockdowns set in, remote work turned from a previously peculiar practice to the norm in a few weeks. The employees seem to have liked remote work, so much so that 61 percent of office workers responding to a survey said that they would look for a new job if they were not offered flexible work in the future. The disappearance of daily commute to work and the associated time and money savings, the chance to spend more time with family and reduced exposure to Covid-19 got employees hooked. 

However, an all-remote workplace does not seem realistic yet. Sharing an office with colleagues make it easier for employees to engage in networking and make their voices heard by the management. Employers, too, have their own reasons for willing to go back to the old way of doing work. Business leaders such as the chief executive officers of Goldman Sachs and Barclays support going back to the office—they notice that some aspects of the work life like the shared culture and resulting synergy cannot be replicated online.

2 - A new labor market for the tech business

Although more traditional segments of economy might have a hard time coming to terms with the new hybrid or remote work arrangements, the tech business seems to be pushing for the change. Slack and Stripe are actively encouraging this by offering their employees one-time bonuses in exchange for accepting a salary cut for remote work. Google is endorsing a hybrid work plan where employees will spend approximately three days working at the office and those opting for full-time remote work will be asked to agree to salary cuts. With 2 out of 5 employees willing to take a pay cut for flexible work, it doesn’t sound too far-fetched that the two parties will soon meet each other in the middle. Actually, signs from the field point to the fact that there already is a new modus vivendi in place, as indicated by the exodus of tech workers from places like the Bay Area in the U.S. 

The Bay Area has been home to some of the biggest tech companies in the world and attracted top talent from all over the world for decades. But things seem to be changing nowadays. Having experienced productivity in a remote work arrangement, tech workers in the Silicon Valley have decided that they could do without the daily commute to work, and some even moved to other states where housing is much more affordable compared to the Bay Area. Texas and Florida seem to be the top destinations benefiting from this exodus. In the new normal in the tech labor market, firms will keep leveraging the skills of their employees and reduce their payrolls while the employees will enjoy higher net earnings thanks to savings on commute and housing. Sounds like a win-win situation, doesn’t it?

3 - Looking for an agile way of driving growth

The pandemic hit every segment of the economy but with varying degrees of damage incurred. Travel and hospitality sectors were particularly hard-hit, spending months out of operation. The pandemic stopped many projects in their tracks: In the U.S. construction business, almost $10 billion worth of infrastructure projects were either delayed or cancelled in the first six months of the pandemic. While the IT sector proved more resilient thanks to leveraging technology and finding ways to keep things running, it still faced wide-scale project delays and cancellations. 

The calamity had caught everyone off-guard this time, unlike the recessions in the past where hundreds of articles and even books warning about the upcoming crises had already been written before the first impact. Pandemic reminded everyone of a kind of unpredictability for which no organization but governments only could hope to take measures. 

This unpredictability will have lasting effects on the business world. Business leaders, from startups to corporate giants, will be reluctant to commit as much time and money to projects as they did in the past. They will want to see proofs of concepts, realistic simulations and reports before pulling the trigger on new projects. The waterfall project management process, which demands big sums and long months before bearing any fruit, will fall out of favor with decision makers who learnt their lessons from the pandemic. Agility and having the option to pivot when necessary will be the order of the day. 

4 - No-code to the rescue

These changes combine to bring no-code platforms to the fore, which are capable of creating proofs of concepts and MVPs much more quickly and at a much lower cost than conventional software development. Consider for a moment a firm which is newly branching out into a new segment of the market and building a sales team as part of this plan. For a firm like this, investing in a top CRM tool and training the employees would involve a lot of risks with the possibility of another peak in the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns looming in the background. Using no-code platforms like Peaka to prototype, test and launch a CRM tool, however, will take a considerably smaller investment and be more likely to fit the specific needs of the firm.

The post-pandemic IT world will be defined by fluidity: People switching careers or relocating for work, and businesses making an effort to be agile in management and project development. Agility and adaptability will keep you in the game while those putting all their eggs in one basket will fall by the wayside sooner or later. We believe that Peaka stands out among competitors by giving you a platform that keeps with the times: Flexible, resourceful and capable of growing with your business.