Our remote working culture is evolving at a rapid pace.  “Jumping in and out of zoom meetings” is becoming an integral part of the workday.

The common topic for many business owners is:

“what shape will the emerging working environment take and what are the platforms a new business owner needs to put into place?”

In a recent meeting I was in, one participant even suggested that “nothing much will change and things should be back to normal quite soon.”

The rationale was that people are social animals, and they will want to go back to what they had before the pandemic arrived and challenged our traditional ways of thinking, working and living.

I am an optimistic person, but I was entirely caught off guard by this perspective because there are several indicators that life as we knew it, may never return.  One reason for this belief is that we were already experiencing an increased pace of change.  Inject an inflection into this change dynamic for 6 to 12 months, and the result will be a different paradigm.

Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in New York with USV, commented in his blog this week:

“….. I am also confident that we will not resume living and working exactly as we did before the pandemic because some of the things we have adopted to get through this will reveal themselves as comparable or better than what we were doing before.”

Almost at the same time as Fred was writing his blog, Jack Dorsey, co-founder and part-time CEO for twitter sent an email to all the twitter staff saying that they could now work from home, remotely or anywhere, permanently.

These examples do not sound like returning to the old normal.

One concern that does arise from developments like this are real health risks to employees who are not experiencing regular face to face interaction with colleagues.  Continuously working remotely from colleagues could enhance or facilitate withdrawal from society.  In Japan, this is a well-researched problem called “Hikikomori” which results in severe depression and mental illness.

Regardless of how things evolve, it will be increasingly crucial for business owners and leaders to stay in touch with the relative health and well being of their staff and provide appropriate support for the new working environment.