Innovation delivered - Under the pressure of the Covid-crisis creativity excels

Due to the Covid-crisis and the resulting confinements, many of us have been forced to work from home. As such collaborating with colleagues has become virtual, but also all other types of professional practices have radically changed, like team events, conferences, trainings…​

As a result a whole new ecosystem of tools and companies has emerged to fill the resulting gap. Everything in this ecosystem aspires 1 common goal, i.e. work safely together in the physical world and even more importantly collaborate and network efficiently in the virtual world. This is truly exciting to have a look at, as never in the history was there such a radical adoption of new habits as in the last year. It shows that in times of crisis, agility and creativity is present in all of us (even in large, often bureaucratic, corporations).

But let’s have a look at a few evolutions:

• The most obvious one is naturally the exponential rise of the video conferencing and chat tools (cfr. my blog "Video conferencing vendors - Get us out of trouble" - https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2020/09/video-conferencing-vendors-get-us-out.html), like Slack, Teams, Skype, Zoom, MatterMost, WebEx, Google Chat…​ Most importantly these tools provide an alternative to physical meetings, but people use them as well to stay personally connected with friends, family and colleagues (e.g. via virtual coffee breaks, virtual aperitifs, virtual pub-evenings, virtual beer or wine tastings…​). Often more specific tools have also risen to cover specific use cases, like Discord (heavily used in the gaming industry to create communities), Whereby (allowing calls without any login or download), Smartschool Live (used at schools), Houseparty (allowing to play games together)…​

• In parallel almost every sector has created a digital/virtual alternative to their existing physical practices. E.g. digital dj-sets (techno parties via live-stream), digital therapy sessions, online holidays (virtual city visits) or museum visits, online fitness sessions, movie evening with friends (via Teleparty, formerly Netflix Party)…​ Some bars in China have even continued to offer happy hours through online orders and delivery.
  In the professional sector this is no different, with training sessions being given online, but also online conferences (with online presentations and debates, but also different break-out rooms to discuss one-to-one or in smaller groups during the breaks) and online team events (like online quizzes, online escape rooms, virtual beer/wine tastings…​).

• These virtualizations of every aspect of networking and collaboration have also given rise to a number of new tools and services, like

  • Delivery services like coffee services equipping employees with good coffee at home, lunch and apero boxes to give a common experience in food and drinks during trainings, conferences or team events (e.g. JustBite), gift boxes for Saint Nicholas or Easter replacing presents placed on employee’s desks…​

  • Tools to organize group gifts digitally, see my blog "Group Gift - A precious tradition being digitized" - https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2020/12/group-gift-precious-tradition-being.html

  • Television studios, allowing to professionalize digital conferences, company events and company announcements. E.g. the Digital Finance Summit conference in Belgium used the television studios of LN24 to provide a professional broadcasting of all speaker sessions. Some companies have even started installing their own small TV studio office booths to broadcast in a professional way today, but also after the Covid-19 crisis.
    Others (e.g. universities) have invested in specific hardware to allow the presenter to be filmed in an almost 180° (or even 360°) camera perspective (e.g. Meeting Owl, Jabra PanaCast…​)

  • Radio broadcasting, replacing the traditional physical New Year’s parties to create employee bonding, i.e. a lot of larger companies (e.g. Fluvius or KBC in Belgium) have organized their own internal radio station during a few days, during which employees and teams were put in the spotlights and employees could request songs to be played.

  • Digital tools to facilitate virtual brainstorming. This can be online whiteboard tools like Miro, Candor, FunRetro, Mural, Stormboard…​ or mind mapping tools like Lucidchart, MindMeister, Ayoa, but could also be as simple as a Google Docs or a Microsoft Excel file shared via sharepoint/OneDrive.

  • Digital tools to support virtual events, like quizzes (Kahoot!), conferences (like Bizzavbo, Thola, InEvent, Splash, Eventbrite…​), online classes and webinars (like Demio, GetResponse, GoToWebinar, WebEx, ClickMeeting, LiveStream…​) or online surveys and polls (like Survey Monkey, PollEverywhere, MentiMeter, Fast Poll, Vevox…​)

  • Digital tools to support someone remotely via remote desktop software like TeamViewer, Microsoft Remote Desktop (RDC) or Apple Remote Desktop (ARD)

  • Tools to supervise an audience, e.g. universities have deployed software for eye-tracking students during exams, avoiding any fraud (like help of a 3rd person) during exams.

  • …​

• At the same time, the radical shift to home working and other effect of the health crisis, has accelerated (exponentially) some evolutions, which were already initiated pre-Covid-crisis. Examples are:

  • The use of cloud computing of cloud providers like Microsoft (Azure), Google (GCP) and Amazon (AWS)

  • The policies with regards to homework. Already dozens of companies have announced they will continue to support homework, even after the Covid-crisis has passed (e.g. Facebook announced in May of 2020, that they will permanently embrace remote work). Consequently this results also in more flexible working hours and a supervision of employees, which is more based on outcome and deliverables, rather than hours spent. This increased flexibility means also that it becomes more difficult to plan meetings, as not everyone might be working at the same moment (which is even worse for remote teams located in different time zones). As a result, more and more companies are embracing asynchronous communication.

  • VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology, allowing call centres to work also remotely by receiving calls over the internet.

  • The obvious boost in eCommerce and digital-first businesses, which radically changes many business processes. E.g. in the banking industry, many banks have already announced an increased pace at which physical branches will be closed.

  • The disappearance of cash, being replaced by card payments (with an exponential rise in the use of NFC) and mobile payments like QR codes (e.g. Payconiq by Bancontact in Belgium), Google/Apple/Samsung Pay…​ This has obviously given rise to new players on the payments market, which accelerates the already started disruption of this landscape.

  • …​

• With so many people working from home, a whole new eco-system of providers of equipment for making your home look more like an office has risen, like:

  • Vendors and platforms for employers to buy or give home-working equipment to employees like laptops, tablets, mobile phones, computer monitors, laptop stands, headphones, office chairs, specific software (like the tools described above…​)…​

  • New types of desks specifically focused for home, like standing desks specifically designed for work at home or dining tables which can be converted into desks (cfr. www.thuiswerktafel.nl)

  • Garden offices, which are prefab fully equipped office buildings that can be placed in your garden.

  • …​

• With some people still needing to go to the physical offices, it is important to manage this in the safest possible way, but the low(er) occupation rates of offices (which will likely stay also after the crisis) gives also possibilities for new tools to reduce office costs. Some examples:

  • Share a part of your unused office space (e.g. ShareDesk, LiquidSpace, Breather…​)

  • Share your parking spots (e.g. ParkOffice)

  • Inform upfront and/or register your presence in the office (or in co-working place) to ensure that sufficient distance can be guaranteed (i.e. not exceeding maximum capacity of the office space), but also to share with colleagues to know where (which office, but also which place, in case of Flex Desk seating) you are working a certain day.

  • New tools and services for cleaning and hygiene, like special door handles which allow to open doors without using your hands, dispensers of alcohol gel (from automatic dispensers to dispensers with foot pedal all the way to special dispensers which clean your chariot in the supermarket), plexi glass screens, distance watches warning you when approaching a colleague too close (like the SafeDistance watch of Lopos or the Radius watch of Rombit)

  • …​

• The rise of remote work has also exponentially increased the digital security risks, like the risk for identity fraud, social engineering, hacking attacks…​ Obviously organizations will have to react to this, by improving their security policies, procedures and tooling, such as employee trainings on security topics, improving pro-active fraud and security breach detection, risk-based authentication mechanisms, installing security tools on all devices, like disk encryption, online backups, password managers (like 1Password), virtual private networks, virus scanners…​

Obviously all those evolutions were forced upon all of us in a very rapid pace. As such, we have only seen the tip of the iceberg, as this rapid transformation to remote collaboration will be even more supported by new state-of-the-art services and tools (e.g. AR and VAR can likely still provide a tremendous progress in this domain), as enormous investments will be done in this domain in the coming years. Clearly everyone is still exploring what works and what doesn’t. These lessons learned will be incorporated in out-of-the-box tools and services, which allow to make the shift to remote-working even more quickly but also more efficiently.
It’s clear however that the shift made now is here to stay also long after Covid. It will be up to each of us to see which tools and practices suit us (and our organization) the best to collaborate in this new virtual world in the most efficient way possible.