Just don't tell me it's the new normal
If I hear the term "the new normal" again I think I will scream.
There's a lot I don't like about COVID. The unnecessary cutting short of lives is the saddest toll of all. The impact of COVID on our personal and work lives have been devastating. In the face of this challenge, we've learnt that every life is precious, and our human spirit has elevated the importance of this during the pandemic.
Another regrettable trend from COVID is the emergence of catastrophists and their colourful use of language to describe what we are going through and what we can expect in the future, and their use of the impacts of COVID to progress their cause.
However, I have also come to really dislike the incredibly overused term "the new normal".
What exactly does this mean? Well, in my opinion I don't think it really means anything. It seems to me that the term has found its way into our everyday language as a lazy metaphor to describe change.
The reality is that for most of us in the workplace today - whether you're approaching retirement, or a new graduate who has just entered the workplace - change has become a constant companion for all of us.
The sudden and unexpected arrival of COVID has simply acted as an incubator for this change, and will accelerate many aspects of it across our everyday lives and the way in which we work.
But as we gradually emerge from our global lockdown, I don't believe that we will be entering a new normal. My view is that we will likely see a temporary impact on many of the social and workplace norms we take for granted, but we will return to a workplace which was remarkably similar to the one we left pre-COVID.
The workplace and the workforce will evolve as we re-engage the global economy. Many of the trends we saw prior to COVID will have been fast-tracked - including remote working, reduced reliance on office space and its more flexible use, more intuitive use of workforce modelling to predict future labour needs, and the deeper leveraging of technologies to help us to work more efficiently and effectively.
Most, if not all of these trends were with us prior to COVID. These are not "the new normal" - they are a continuum of the disruption of the workplace we have seen gradually accelerate over the past 20 years.
Admittedly there will be some seismic changes which will arrive far earlier and in a more impactful way as a result of COVID. But many, if not all, of these changes would have happened in any event.
In 2012 Deloitte produced the second in its series of Building the Lucky Country thought leadership reports - Digital disruption-short fuse, big bang. The report estimated that one-third of the Australian economy faced imminent and substantial disruption by digital technologies and business models – what Deloitte called a ‘short fuse, big bang’ scenario. This presented significant threats, as well as opportunities, for both business and government.
The workplace impacts arising from COVID remind me of the digital disruptors many industries experienced in 2012. Australia’s business and government leaders do not need to look far into the future to see the new wave of workplace and workforce disruption headed towards them. In fact, much of it is already here, transforming the way companies and agencies operate and how they engage with their workforce and their customers.
The industry in which I operate is a perfect example of this "short fuse, big bang" impact on the workplace and workforce.
The immigration industry is long overdue for disruption. In spite of the clock ticking on the disruption of the industry, very few seemed motivated or visionary to embrace the future and actually become a disruptor.
COVID has meant that the immigration industry is facing its "Kodak" moment. This term will not be familiar to many readers, but simply refers to the enormous disruption which was inflicted on the company Eastman Kodak by the onset of digital photography. A company founded in 1888 in Rochester New York, largely disappeared from the corporate landscape in a very short space of time because it did not plan for or foresee the impact of the ultimate disruptor on its industry.
Yes, the immigration industry will need to evolve its business model in order to survive the workplace and workforce changes which will arise from COVID. But so too will numerous industries impacted by the rapidly changing landscape we will experience in the next few years - commercial real estate, travel, human resources amongst them.
However, this is not a time to be pessimistic about the future of work. Rather it is a time for all of us to embrace innovation and finally become comfortable with the one constant which will remain with all of us for our working lifetimes - change.