Knoetic Curations: The New Normal
Updated
The "New Normal” of work, and our broader world in the coming 10 years.
One of the things we loved about founding Knoetic was getting to work with Chief People Officers who think as both culture builders and business leaders.
So today, Knoetic's Curated Collection takes a different tack. We want to encourage you to think about “The New Normal” of work, and our broader world in the coming 10 years.
One of the most thoughtful summaries we've seen is based on a World Economic Forum interview with Adam Grant (for the few of you who don't know us personally, I was lucky to have him as a former professor during my time @ Wharton, and as an early angel investor in Knoetic).
Adam Grant: This is how COVID-19 could change the world of work for good
The other 4 articles discuss how the world - social, political, cultural - will change in the coming decade:
- 54 Ways Coronavirus Has Changed Our World (New York Times): this one is brief & elegantly designed.
- ‘We can’t go back to normal’: how will coronavirus change the world? (The Guardian)
- Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How. (Politico)
- We're not going back to normal (MIT Technology Review)
And if you want our version of the takeaways, here's how we believe the world will change in the next 10 years:
8 Broad Societal Changes
- Widespread acceptance and normalization of routinized health testing, and increased government oversight, surveillance and intervention.
- Dramatic reimagining of the cities & urban centers.
- Bringing out both the best & worst in human behavior: observed spikes in both selfish behavior and sustained prosocial, altruistic behavior.
- The end of the handshake and social touch.
- Sadly, long-lasting mental trauma beyond the crisis itself.
- Dramatic, accelerated, sustained shifts to all activity moving online, whether it’s commerce, learning, or health-related.
- Changed perceptions (and lessened stigma) around unemployment and mental health (and, as a result, likely accompanying policy changes as public opinions shift).
- Changed perception of what a “good” company is: focus on profits over growth, resiliency over efficiency/cost containment.
8 Changes in the Way We Work
- People analytics becomes even more important, as companies look to better measure employee data, productivity, engagement in a productive & collectively beneficial way.
- Remote work, distributed workforces, and flexible hours are here to stay.
- The move towards remote work means the demand curve for commercial real estate will permanently shift...
- Which also means that people, places, and facilities budgets will decrease substantially (away from office spaces, and towards benefits).
- Demand for business travel will permanently decrease.
- The definition of a workday will continue to evolve in this new world.
- And finally... remote work also means that talent markets will become much more evenly distributed. This makes it likely that marked geographic differences in compensation will be at least partially compressed.
