Despite many largely transparent attempts to convince workers and companies alike, the dust has now settled and we are fully entering the post-pandemic era. Work will magically go back to how it was before, we all know the real truth. The face of how, where and even why we work has changed forever. What does this mean for workers in the future? What is the New Work Era? And will companies that are slow to adapt survive the transition? Today we’re taking a look at how the meaning of work has changed forever — and why that’s not a bad thing at all.

The shock of 2020

It’s tempting for many to believe that the work-from-home, or WFH, revolution started abruptly in March 2020. And it’s true that March-May 2020 would be the tipping point as organizations worldwide were forced to face the reality of a work environment that changed almost overnight. Now it was no longer about the “future” of work, but about the immediate now. How do you keep your employees busy without coming to the office? today? Fit or die was very much at play

There was a nest of hiccups to navigate. In particular, the rapid need for flexible, intuitive and economical cybersecurity solutions on an unprecedented scale. But overall we didn’t do badly. It’s rare to see positives in the COVID-19 crisis, but it certainly proved that both ordinary people and the serious organizations that had resisted change for decades could fluidly transform to thrive in the New Work -Era not only to survive but to thrive.

The era of new work: not everything new

But despite the crisis that triggered the abrupt change in 2020, let’s be brutally honest. This transformation of work is nowhere near as new as it feels. What held back the New Work era prior to 2020 was neither a lack of imagination, creativity or conceptualization, nor the lack of the technology needed to support it. It was just corporate inertia.

Before the digital revolution, working from home models like the ones we see today would have been nearly impossible. At best, you’ve managed to enable a sick or incapacitated but critical employee to do some work at home. However, you would be tied to a desk with a dedicated phone line, have difficulty accessing company resources while not in the office, have no sense of community or interaction to draw on, and productivity would likely be far less than when you were in the office. The infrastructure to help them work efficiently from home simply wasn’t there. It was more the equivalent of bringing homework to a sick school child than a truly viable corporate solution.

However, as computers became both mobile and connected, we’ve seen the technology needed to work from home efficiently and effectively come online and mainstream well before 2020. The first VPNs were introduced in 1996. Cloud-based solutions were conceived in the mid 90’s and a practical reality in the mid 2000’s. At the same time that high-speed broadband internet was becoming common in US homes. Remote support and screen sharing also became a reality around this time. Smartphone penetration surpassed 50% in the US in 2014, and cell phones were commonplace before that. Cybersecurity safeguards have evolved in parallel with the wider Internet reach, albeit at different levels of responsiveness, effectiveness, and affordability, of course.

In short, it wasn’t technology that prevented the New Work era from starting much earlier on a broad scale. It wasn’t even the conceptualization. As early as the early 1990s, the US Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration considered working from home a viable solution. The Federal Flexible Workplace Pilot Project invented the idea of ​​”flexiplaces” to “assess the benefits and challenges of enabling employees to work in locations other than their government office.” 550 employees took part and their results reflect what we see today. Increased productivity, reduced office space and lower costs. Telecommuting for government officials and the Clinton-era call for “flexible allowance for family” were actually pretty well received at the time.

The rise of the gig economy

Brett Jordan/Unsplash Ride-sharing services, meal delivery apps, and similar entities are perfect representations of the gig economy at work

This idea was echoed in the rise of the “new company,” strongly associated with Silicon Valley and the boom of forward-thinking, ultra-trendy tech startups that lured talent with the promise of flexibility, “working from the beach.” , and a very different model from the “standard” corporate business that was in play for workers at the time.

The late noughties are also seen as something of a turning point for the rise of the “gig economy,” a term coined in 2009 by former New Yorker editor Tina Brown. The gig economy itself is a little different from work-from-home workers in the “knowledge economy,” who would look for multiple projects and contracts, often part-time, all transacted through digital marketplaces rather than a traditional one to seek employment in a company. It is best thought of as the entry of the traditional contract worker into the digital space.

However, most of these new gig workers didn’t have an office space at all, instead working from home and using all of the available tech resources we just looked at to get the job done. So the two stories are very intertwined, and the gig economy has been a big driver of the development of working from home for over a decade at this point.

The gig economy has also been the driver of the increasing demand for outsourced solutions. Key operational areas such as administration, marketing, IT support, and “back office” duties are critical to a successful business, but represent complete skills in their own right. For small and medium-sized businesses in particular, having a full-time employee for them is not always productive aspects to deal with, but they can greatly distract from the core business tasks and are a necessity of modern business. Enter remote assistance to keep things running effectively.

Coupled with increasing globalization and the idea that you can employ talent globally and not just in one geographic area, it’s creating the slow simmer of a workplace revolution like never before. One that we can realistically pin down to the late noughties and post-2010 era — well over a decade before the 2020 labor crisis pushed everyone out of their corporate cozy nests.

corporate inertia

If everything was in place for remote work many years before COVID visited, why did it take the pandemic to effect a massive shift in the way we work? It’s a question that has rightly propelled academic study, so there’s a lot more to unpack than we’re going to mention here. But the simplest explanation is corporate inertia. In other words, if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

Office buildings are rented, middle management is eyeing the cubicle farm and everything “just works”. Newer, more forward-thinking companies were beginning to understand that better serving the human aspect of their business is the way to succeed, just like these early tech startups. Flexi-work and the idea of ​​the digital nomad are now well-known terms. But older companies and less exciting industries just continued doing what they’ve always done with little incentive to change. It was tried and tested, simpler, and required no additional investment or new skills. Until the big break and the need for a workplace revolution that caught many big companies with their pants down.

The new era of work is here: Embrace it

There are many workplace challenges to overcome as there is a mass migration to WFH, but one thing is for sure. Employee requirements and workplace practices have changed forever. Fortunately, technology has reached a point where companies can transform the way they work and Corporate culture relatively simple. It is quite clear that at least flexible working arrangements will remain a major draw for employees.

Despite the perception that without a manager’s constant vigilance, employees “slack off,” real-world statistics suggest that productivity is maintained or improved in WFH models. A good manager can motivate a team without them being there directly. Maintaining corporate culture is more difficult. Some would like more interaction in the workplace, others would like to do without it. Hybrid work may become the more dominant model, or we may see a move towards full remote work. Much of this is also industry dependent. Some industries have a far greater need for personal labor than others.

Likewise, third-party cybersecurity and risk management have become a focus in the New Work era. How do you enable seamless work-from-home protocols without compromising sensitive data? How can you onboard a remote workforce managing access rights risks? How do we secure cloud servers and resources without risking data leaks and exploits? Rapid waves of change are inevitable as we settle into a changing work landscape.

It’s the early days of mass WFH protocols, and predicting the future is a snap. We are still tentatively taking our first steps back into a post-pandemic world. However, one thing is absolutely certain. The WFH and remote work “trend” of 2020 was the dawn of a new work era that will become the norm. There will be no mass rollback to older working models. Companies that want to be successful in the New Work era need future-oriented solutions for the new challenges that it brings with it. A sustainable new normal is here, and it’s up to companies big and small to embrace it and find their place in it.

Author Bio: Tevai excels at creating compelling content and consuming caffeine. When she’s not writing ad copy, she’s enjoying the world with her Lhasa Apsos.