Corona and the “New Normal”

From exotic to mainstream in just six months! 

When we started practicing and training virtual collaboration in our consulting business twelve years ago, virtual work was an exceptional phenomenon: Few companies had some home office users plus a few in-house IT specialists with great bargaining power whose individual demands regarding their work environment had to be met if one wanted to keep them. Furthermore, there were freelancers described as “digital nomads”, condescendingly smiled at but also envied when they presented their “work” results from the beach of a South Sea island. Finally, there were some startups bringing together specialists from all over the world and “remote work” missionaries, mostly platform providers, who first and foremost practiced their business model in their own companies. The collaboration tools had very limited functionality and were inadequate by today’s standards. But one tried to put this aside and somehow practice virtual collaboration. Overall, however, the opinion prevailed that co-located office work was here to stay. 

Since COVID-19, everything has changed: Everybody is now talking about the “New Normal”, it almost turned into a hype. Almost daily new surveys or studies are being cited, according to which employees would like more WFH (“Work from Home”).  Online collaboration tools are experiencing a boom, their providers are clearly among the COVID-19 winners. Skeptics, who, prior to COVID-19, always argued that physical proximity was a must for true collaboration, suddenly realize that a lot of things can still be done when working together virtually. For many, changing working methods were driven by the need to be able to continue their business and less by the insight that virtual working methods could have genuine advantages. Everywhere, wishes and hopes were expressed that after the lockdown phase, people would return to the “old normal”, i.e. to their accustomed workplace. 

Benefits and risks are not yet clearly discernable! 

Meanwhile, almost all people in organizations and companies have gained experience in using virtual tools and have formed their opinion. At a closer look, the picture is very diverse: Some studies emphasize the advantages, others describe how initial euphoria turned into disillusionment about the alleged positive effects of working from a distance or from home office. 

The main pros are: 

• Meetings are shorter and you get to the point faster. 
• Fewer disturbances allow for more concentrated work. 
• Travel and set-up times are minimized. 

All in all, increasing productivity, the same results with less resource input and medium and long-term cost savings through less office space. 

In addition to tangible work experiences, those studies also look at larger social contexts: Advantages for people with disabilities, potential for new living concepts, less time spent commuting, climate and environmental factors, etc.  

However, surveys also point to a large number of cons: 

• Communication in virtual cooperation is more limited with little room for spontaneity. 
• There is less contact with the boss and colleagues. 
• Training and briefings are more time-consuming; new employees need longer to get into the job. 
• The processing of complex and creative joint tasks (brainstorming, problem solving, strategic topics) takes longer or does not work at all. 

Negotiations and recalibration are just beginning! 

This controversial discussion raises questions about the medium and long-term effects in organizations: How do you integrate new employees into the organization if they have little or no personal contact? How do you develop a corporate culture when a large part of the workforce works from home? How do you prevent a two-tier society between those who are allowed to work from the home and those who cannot because of the nature of the workplace (e.g. production workers)? 

As the COVID-19 situation is still relatively new, the motives and insights mentioned above have only reached a rather superficial phenomenological level. Beliefs still dominate the discussion and there are little findings regarding measured effectiveness and longer-term attitudinal effects. Skepticism also seems to be quite justified, as positive effects could also be due to the fear of losing one’s job. In one company, the new offer of “free choice between 0 and 100% home office ” was combined with an overall 10% salary cut for all.  

And those who now enjoy the peace and quiet and the undisturbed working environment far from the office, do so, because they benefit from their professional socialization in a face-to-face context. They can rely on these established relationships which will last, even if most of the work is done remotely.  

It remains to be seen how the balance between employee wishes and company interests will develop in the future. The length of the current state of reduced economic activity will also certainly be an influencing factor. Some tech giants have already announced the closure of their offices by the end of the year; others have just decided to keep the WFH concept permanently. 

We have the tools, but no new house yet! 

We are still a far away from having reached the “New Normal”. The potentials and the effects on the work process under distance conditions (WFH is only one variant!) are far from being fully used. Opening a zoom conference or a meeting on MS Teams does not constitute a new way of working, but only telephoning with camera support. New tools that can be used for asynchronous distributed work are now being purchased more widely and are more available, but they are still hardly used to the full extent. For effective use, adequate changes in the work processes are required! This change takes years in larger organizations, in smaller ones at least one year, even if it is implemented in a designed change process. Actually, everybody knows that who has ever implemented a complex business software or reminds himself of how long we have been using e-mail and how many problems we still have with this collaboration tool due to information overload and misunderstandings. 

The profound technical change has catapulted us into new forms of collaboration and communication in recent months and we have landed in a world that is determined by new rules and standards. This process is similar to stepping into a different culture, a different living environment. And we also react in a similar way by first minimizing the differences when describing our own behavior and exaggerating what is similar to our previous world of experience. Or we overestimate the differences and become deeply insecure. Only by oscillating between these two extremes do we arrive at the “New Normal”, with a sober view and knowledge of the similarities and differences to the “Old Normal”, and can appropriately use the potential of what is new. 

We still need a long time before we can take things for granted!

This process can only be accelerated to a limited extent, let alone be skipped. We must now recognize the specific rules of the game, discover specific hurdles and difficulties and new opportunities with the aim of improving our own ability to act in the new environment as well as possible. And, on our journey we will have to jointly master more and more difficult tasks and challenges for which we do not yet have any good solutions, i.e. creative processes, complex problem solutions, strategy issues. Furthermore, it is now essential to build, maintain and deepen relationships among people over distance as a basis to cope with these challenges. 

This journey into relatively unchartered waters is just beginning. A lot of things are currently being tried out and practical experience is gathered. In the coming weeks, we will explore some of the possible landscapes in our blogs and show ways to increase work efficiency under distance conditions.