Business: The “New Normal”

So, “what is the ‘new normal’?”, seems to be the question that everyone is asking. On February 12th, my world changed forever, and forecasts made on that day have increasingly become reality, so I thought it useful to share some of those to help you and your business prepare for the next stage of your journey.

There are many transitional elements of the change, and it’s sometimes difficult to predict which will be residual, and how much ‘spring back’ we will see once the initial major impact of Coronavirus starts to fade away, but the trends and patterns are quite clear, and being slightly over-cautious has always proven to be a good strategy for me – or put another way, not being cautious enough, can be catastrophic.

‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’ was Winston Churchills quote as we were approaching the end of WWII. Indeed, Britain boomed immediately after the war, as the nation rebuilt and used lessons learned from the war to boost the economy, and bring to being great new institutions such as the NHS.

This approach is already being used by many companies and indeed sectors, as we move through these early stages of the pandemic. One small example of this is Estate agents, who have been able to use social distancing to completely change how we buy houses. For far too long, we have all been able to waste days of estate agents time, snooping into other people’s gardens, getting interior decoration ideas and basically not been qualified leads for the sale of a property. Efficiency of the house buying process has now jumped through the roof with virtual viewings, where online, Estate agents can host many viewings all at the same time taking questions on chat. You are unable to make a real viewing without proving that you have an offer on your own property (if you have one to sell) and cannot make an offer until your mortgage is approved and in place. This process is unlikely to revert post pandemic, the value for all involved is far too high – a seller knows they are only entertaining qualified leads, and a buyer, that the competition is more fairly stripped back to only those that can proceed. And as for the estate agent, the reduction in overheads is so significant that there is no driver for them to ever want to go back.

We all know of the changes associated with working from home. Companies that previously didn’t allow it had no choice, and having found out how effective it is, are already changing policies to allow it, and at times, positively encourage it. For sure, I would not want to be heavily invested in commercial property right now, which completely goes against the previous long-term trend of security in bricks and mortar.

So, what does that mean for the digital world – that’s it now, everything has moved over to digital and there will be no going back…right? Well, actually, this one is more of a ‘no’. Of course, huge steps have been made in virtualisation, and operating online – Zoom, Teams, Bluejeans etc. are all much more readily accepted, but here we will see a degree of spring back. As humans, there are certain core values we hold, and natural requirements we have that mean we won’t fully transition yet. Many people yearned for people interactions during lockdown, and as we continue to unlock, those people interactions will gain in importance as we appreciate more and more the true value in them.

So these are just a few examples of the new normal, but many more can be determined by just extrapolating all the trends that were happening before the pandemic, as all that has happened is that they have accelerated, and some of them massively:-

The key message for all of us in this, is that out of crisis comes opportunity, and it doesn’t matter whether recent events have made your business flourish, or they have been a real threat, if you embrace the current situation, and work out how you capitalise on those new trends, you too can flourish and prosper from the ‘new normal’.