The COVID19 pandemic is turbocharging the “dynamic” aspect of not just work but home life too. Dynamic Work has focused mostly on the production of work remote from the office, as The Atlantic piece “The Pandemic Will Change American Retail Forever” describes, even restaurant dining is moving markedly remote from the restaurant:

• “Repurposed means the restaurant of 2010 isn’t going to be the restaurant of 2025,”’O’Connor said. ‘The pandemic is going to accelerate the shift to contactless delivery of meals, groceries, and products of all kinds.’ As more restaurants recognize that they cannot make rent by filling hygienically spaced seats, they will become, simply, for-profit kitchens—a place where food is prepared but less commonly eaten. Once again, this shift was already happening slowly, but is being accelerated by the pandemic. Last year I wrote that given the growth of so-called “off premise” dining, 2020 would likely be the first year that American restaurants made more than half of their revenue from delivery, drive-through, and takeout. Nobody could have predicted that this milestone would be reached due to the absolute zeroing-out of on-premise dining.”

Derek Thompson refers to the “The Big Acceleration” – “the long term, COVID-19 probably won’t invent new behaviors and habits out of thin air as much as it will accelerate a number of pre-existing trends.” The Dynamic Work (and Dynamic Wok) megatrend coming to the fore with alarming speed.

 

Past the point
Of no return –
No backward glances:
The games we’ve played
Till now are at
An end…
Past all thought
Of “if” or “when” –
No use resisting:
Abandon thought
And let the dream
Descend…

It’s debatable as to how much, ie the majority, of work will be done “outside the office” in the post-COVID19 economy, but one thing we can be sure of with regards to remote and flexible working – we are now well and clearly past the point of no return.

The lockdowns have indelibly altered the experience, expectations and expertise of the work force. What has been seen cannot be unseen. “Past all thought” as the Phantom of the Opera song implores. The Economist underscored this perspective in one of their pieces covering the crisis, “The changes covid-19 is forcing on to business”:

• “Responding to covid-19 has seen many people and companies realise that it had more to offer them than they had realised. Zoom, an online videoconferencing service, was serving 10m customers a day at the beginning of the year, most of them in business meetings. Now it is providing 200m people a day not just with meetings, but with Tai Chi classes and “quarantinis”. Slack, which provides a medium by which far-flung colleagues can co-ordinate things, has become part of dinner-table conversation. It is not only young tech-companies, and tech companies that were previously mostly used by the young, that have prospered. Microsoft’s Teams product is gaining many converts. No one expects the amount of distance working ever again to be as low as it was before the virus hit.”

Past the point
Of no return,
The final threshold –
What warm,
Unspoken secrets
Will we learn?
Beyond the point
Of no return…