🙅🏽♀️🙅🏻♂️🏢The death of the office
The world is running the largest-ever human capital experiment: millions of office workers worldwide are working from their new offices — their kitchen tables and living rooms — and early indicators show the experiment is a big success.
People seem to have had an epiphany regarding the countless virtues and benefits of working from the coziness of their homes, not least the avoidance of their daily commute.
Businesses, too, see spikes in engagement and productivity. Moreover, as businesses face the need to quickly cut down on costs, CEO’s flag real estate portfolios as prime target for cost reduction.
“The notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past” —Jes Staley, CEO, Barclays
Google, for example, hit the pause button on a large Silicon Valley deal.
There are strong reasons to believe, then, that we’re witnessing the emergence of a new world of work normal.
Corporate human capital is entering a new age.
This seismic shift into a virtual and distributed human capital involves a wholesale rebooting and reshaping of the ways we work, recruit, hire, collaborate, train, manage, and lead.
The immediate implications are too many to be outlined right now.
The most revealing analogy, though, is that of retail — namely, the death of high street retail and the nearly zero-sum dominance of online retail platforms (think Amazon).
Coronavirus is massively accelerating the shift into the new normal, but certainly did not start it.
Talent has been moving upward on the physical-to-virtual trajectory ever since digital technology started eating up traditional work models.
Regardless of whether the shift is partial or whole, it’s the dawn of a new age of human capital.
Stay tuned.