Abandon Everything
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Abandon Everything
| WFH EFT | The End Of Business Travel? | Offices Are Worth Less | Remote Workers Aren’t | Workflow Management |
2020–04–27 Beacon NY | I recently came upon the Peter Drucker quote below, for which I am indebted for today's title.
Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive in the future.
| Peter Drucker
A ‘work from home’ ETF may be coming soon | Paul La Monica reports on how to benefit from WFH: invest in it.
There’s a good chance you’re reading this story in your home office, given that the coronavirus pandemic has upended how (and where) millions of us are now working.
So it should come as no surprise that there may soon be an ETF dedicated to the rapidly growing work-from-home economy.
Fund company Direxion has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a fund that would own companies that are likely to benefit from more people working virtually.
The exchange-traded fund would be based on an upcoming new Remote Work index from Solactive that Direxion said will likely include web conferencing leader Zoom Video Communications (ZM), cybersecurity firms Fortinet (FTNT) and Okta (OKTA) and document management software firm Box (BOX).
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Business Travel Has Stopped. No One Knows When It Will Come Back. | Jane Levere spoke with people in the travel industry about the post-pandemic future, whenever that turns out to be.
In a survey this month by the Global Business Travel Association, a trade group for corporate travel managers, nearly all its members said their employers had canceled or suspended all or most previously booked or planned international business travel, while 92 percent said all or most domestic business travel had been canceled or suspended.
The latest findings of STR, a lodging research company, were equally stunning: In the week that ended April 11, hotel occupancy in the United States was down 70 percent from the same week in 2019, to 21 percent, and hotels’ revenue per available room, the major barometer of profitability, was down 84 percent to $15.61.
Various travel business watchers are saying ‘The current crisis is like nothing we’ve ever seen before’ and the declines in travel are the ‘steepest’ ever measured. But I think we can discount as wishful thinking their projections that business travel will resume in the next two or three months.
One of the biggest unknowns is the possible long-term impact of the current widespread use of videoconferencing tools, like GoToMeeting, Webex and Zoom.
Mr. Derchin, for one, said the longer “we have the quarantine,” the more people who hadn’t used such tools previously “will get used to it.”
That, he said, could lead to a possible decline in the growth of international business travel — particularly to large hubs like London, Paris, Frankfurt, Miami, Los Angeles and Tokyo — and thus in demand for wide-body aircraft.
Mr. Snyder said that although companies would take a closer look at virtual meetings, “the value of in-person meetings can’t be replaced by technology.”
Well, Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, once famously stated ‘There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home’. He’s was proven wrong a long time ago, but in the present it’s clear that the reason to have a computer in the home is to conduct work there.
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‘I Don’t Think the New York That We Left Will Be Back for Some Years’ | J. David Goodman offers up a financial inversion: now that companies are aware that they will need to socially distance in the workplace — at least for the foreseeable future, and perhaps forever — then their office space is worth less since it can’t house as many workers:
Large and midsize companies are beginning to plan for a return to the workplace, in phases. Some are thinking about how to use their existing office space when workers cannot be packed together as tightly, and questioning how much they should be expected to pay for it.
“Because of the need for social distancing, that space is far less valuable,” said Neil Blumenthal, one of the co-chief executives at Warby Parker, the glasses company headquartered in SoHo. “We’re all going to need more space, or use it less.”
City officials and business leaders privately expressed concern that, with executives seeing just how well their companies could operate remotely, some might decide to downsize, or move out of New York City altogether.
How many people now want to move out of dense urban metros, too, to the suburbs and beyond.
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The Remote Playbook: Who succeeds in the coronavirus-driven shift to remote work? | Roberto Torres asks some key questions:
Setting up remote workers for success also means understanding their context and how they connect with the co-located team.
“Just because an employee is working remotely, doesn’t mean they’re off the grid working independently from others,” said Kirsty Ford, director of people operations at DigitalOcean. “Managers must avoid the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality and instead realize that remote employees are equally (if not more) connected to a company’s community than their onsite counterparts.”
I wrote about this at length in Paradoxes of Engagement: Remote Isn’t. I quoted the Gallup State of the American Workplace 2017 report:
All employees who spend at least some (but not all) of their time working remotely have higher engagement than those who don’t ever work remotely.
And those that work remotely 60%-80% of the time say they are more likely to strongly agree that working remotely makes them more productive.
Elsewhere
Workflow Management: Bringing Order From Chaos | Stowe Boyd
Workflow Management solutions — such as Unito — are technology platforms intended to cross-connect the fragmentary processes within disparate work management tools and enable end-to-end strategic workflows. Workflow management amplifies the benefits of work management tools, supporting the organization’s need to balance the desire for specialized work management tools in different groups and the need for unified enterprise-wide management of workflows.
This integration approach allows work management vendors to focus on what they are best for: the work management solution finely-tooled for marketing can seek to be the best in that niche, while the tool that is best for software developers can concentrate on the needs of that group of users. Workflow management enables work management tools to focus on their strengths.
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Work Week | Information Needs Organization | Zoom, Zoom, Zoom | VC: Notion, Airtable, Sprout.ai, Anodot, Lucid, Miro | WFH ETF | Workflow Management |