Every day there is a new story or report on how COVID will impact X, whether business, industry sector, country, health, your brain, and so on. This has been going for months, and obviously will continue for a long time.
In fact yesterday I posted about this in relation to the island I live (Guernsey).
I’ve since started a very basic list of these impacts. I’ve divided up into first order (direct) and second order impacts (indirect). I haven’t done so but I will need to categorise them.
Over time I’ll aim to build up in a database and post updates here. In the meantime, please feel to comment or add your perspectives here or on the socials.
First Order Impacts
- Reduction of in-bound and outbound business and leisure travel
- Increasing shift to online business development and sales
- Increased e-commerce and local delivery needs
- Increased demand for flexible and remote working
- Increased home office improvement needs
- Shifting social and psychological contract for workers and consumers
- Increasing focus on mental health, wellbeing, worker and customer safety, trust
- Office rationalisation due to safety measures and demand for flexible working
- Smarter, frictionless offices with more automation, smartphone ID, facial recognition and refit for more experiential work e.g. client meets, collaboration, workshops, creativity, training
- Increased demand for more use cases beyond shopping for contactless payments and frictionless ordering e.g. restaurants, cafes
- Commercial real estate, higher education and executive training, and hospitality models upended
Second Order Impacts
- Trust, safety, culture differentiator for certain workplaces in areas
- Potential migration away from over-populated major cities (e.g. UK) into second cities, regional or coastal areas
- Universities unlikely to open meaning a significant number of ‘gap’ years for 18 year olds
- Existing older leaders aim to cement positions and hold on to ‘power’ or a changing of the guard for new perspectives
- Changing mix of workforce with more comfort for a ‘talent anywhere’ model
- Requirement for more flexible resourcing with demand for more specialised contract and freelancers
- New sectors developing hybrid on/offline business models for smarter, more relevant customer experiences e.g. education, gyms, training, retail
- More public and private infrastructure development
- Talent anywhere to hire the best wherever they are
- Smarter, frictionless, reconfigured offices which may be provided as a perk
- Smart phone use cases in-store increase e.g. digital ID, office access, ordering in-store
- Privacy issues around any contact tracing services
- Retail high-streets and commercial workplaces continue to transform with more residential housing
Andrew Essa 