The end of Groundhog Day – what should businesses do next?
The 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray, tells the tale of a man trapped in a time loop. He is doomed to repeat the same day over and over again until he gets it right. Thankfully, we are not in a mystical time loop – but the Covid-19 pandemic has had the effect of making it feel as though time was standing still.
So, what has changed over the past year? Four themes stand out – the shift from pandemic to endemic, the “hybrid” workplace, trouble with travel, and climate change.
If 2021 was the year the world turned the tide against the pandemic, 2022 will be dominated by the need to adjust to new realities, both in areas reshaped by the crisis (e.g. the new world of work, the future of travel) and as deeper trends assert themselves (e.g. the acceleration of climate change).
Pandemic to endemic.
Looking back to last Christmas, much of what was happening at that time looks set to re-run over Christmas 2021. In the run up to Christmas 2020, we were experiencing the emergence of a new covid (Delta) variant. We don’t yet know what the impact of Omicron will be, but initial data suggests it is coming at us fast. Despite the World Health Organization (WHO) calling Omicron a “high risk” variant, we do know how to fight it. New antiviral pills, improved antibody treatments and more vaccines are coming. For vaccinated people, the virus should no longer be life-threatening. The CP Pharmaceuticals factory in Wrexham continues to be critical in the UK’s fight against Covid-19. The factory is responsible for putting the vaccine in vials and packaging it for dispatch to the UK regulator for inspection.
The future of work.
There is a broad consensus that the future of work is “hybrid”, and that more people will spend more days working from home. But there is much scope for disagreement on the details. How many days, and which ones? And will it be fair? In-office work promotes structure and transparency, which may increase trust between management and workers. In-office develops an organizational culture happens naturally. Casual office conversations – a worker walking down the hall for a quick and unscheduled chat with a colleague, for instance – can lead to knowledge-sharing and collaborative problem-solving. That’s difficult to replicate in a virtual environment, which often relies on advance scheduling