Getting to grips with the 'New Normal'
The ‘New Normal’; an expression that’s now all too familiar in everyday conversation, like ‘lockdown’, ‘furlough’ and ‘WFH’. Unlike the other’s though, this phrase is open to broad interpretation and covers myriad areas that will, no doubt, impact our daily existence.
There’s the obvious starting point – work. What will that look like? Well, if you listen to Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon, it’s an ‘an aberration that we’re going to correct as soon as possible’. Within the finance sector, it appears Mr Solomon is not alone; JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon said that ‘working from home has had a negative effect on productivity’.
Though this is contradicted by other financial institutions such as Nationwide and PwC, with the former empowering 13,000 workers with a ‘work from anywhere’ strategy. Natonwide’s CEO Joe Garner stated, “We’ve listened and learned, and are now deciding to move forward not back”. Similarly, PwC suggested that the way forward was to enable all of its 22,000 strong work force to spend between 40-60% working from home.
Across a broader audience, the BBC questioned the UK’s top 50 largest employers. The data was overwhelmingly in favour of a hybrid model with 86% of firms suggesting that they will embrace 2-3 days per week, working from home, as the new normal.
Clearly, these new normal surveys are inappropriately biased towards white collar work – as if, in the media’s eyes, there is no other impact worth investigating. I very much doubt that lorry drivers, factory workers, nurses and fireman will be asked about their views on the new way of working as they won’t have the luxury of choosing where they work. The reported ‘new normal’ seems to be written by offices workers for office workers, as if no other sectors exist.
Within the office-sector, one might think that it’s a story of two halves – those with their established careers, comfortable homes and 2-3 decades of office time under their belts (younger Boomers, Gen X and the first half of millennials) vs. those that are relatively new to the workplace and don’t have home environments conducive to being an office for a large portion of the week (younger millennials and older Gen Z). It’s not as simple as this though, because the accessibility for roles has been blown wide open now that geographical location is no longer a pre-requisite. Skills can now be matched to perfect jobs, for many, without compromising the location of where one chooses to live.
This is a game changer, for both employers and employees. Suddenly, talent can be accessed from anywhere, without having to move them. Opportunities for career progression are no longer hampered by consideration for say, your partner’s career plans or proximity to family and friends. Those companies maintaining the traditional policy of recruiting within a catchment area of the office, will find themselves not only with a limited talent pool, in comparison to their competitors who are less restricted, but also with much greater competition for those limited local resources, all of whom are now ‘fair game’ for employers nationally and internationally.
The opportunities are demographical as well as geographical. Consider disabled resources; the Employer’s Forum on Disability states that there are 7 million working-age adults in the UK today, representing 18% of the potential workforce. It’s difficult to identify just how many, within this group, face reduced opportunities because of their inability to commute to an office. However, if one assumed that just 5% of this demographic had talents that were hindered by the old model of employment, this would result in an additional 350,000 workers being available to employers that previously wouldn’t have accessed them.
This is not new though; pre pandemic, the technology that allowed remote working was abundant. However, the shift has been in mindset based upon the extent to which everyone has seen how WFH is an effective option.
However, what of the ‘new normal’ beyond office work?
The ‘death of the high street’ in its old form was inevitable, but not as a casualty of the pandemic; that just made for a swift and less painful end. A digital new normal for retail has been on the cards for some years now and, with every daily purchase from Amazon, I lament myself for being part of the revolution that puts obscene levels of power and profit into a handful of global ‘megacorporations’ yet, nonetheless, I yield to a proposition that is overwhelmingly more appealing than the traditional alternative.
As with companies evolving for remote working, high streets will adapt too, with a likely blend of residential apartments and service-orientated, experience-led propositions that can’t be purchased online. Anything but another coffee shop, I hear you say. Once again, the new normal will become just normal with, perhaps, only convenience stores, supermarkets and the truly artisan propositions surviving the onslaught of the digital giants.
Is the death of high street retail really any different though, to the seismic shifts that occurred for local food suppliers, with the emergence of the supermarket? Since the UK’s first supermarket, in 1951, the subsequent 7 decades enabled the ‘Big Four’ to decimate local providers and now control over 73% of UK grocery market. We seem to be ok with this, perhaps in the same way we’ll be ok with the retail revolution that’s underway right now – it’s a shame, but we get what we ask for, as it’s our spending habits that dictate the winners and losers.
What of more socially orientated new normal ramifications? The restriction of civil liberties, the acceptance of tracking, tracing and temperature-taking, the blanket narrative from the media that blatantly serves a political agenda, the vaccine passport, the notion that it’s ok to for the solution to a problem that is catastrophic for 1% of the population to harmfully impact 99% of the population.
The coronavirus bill that was rushed through Parliament at a breakneck pace afforded the power to detain and isolate people indefinitely, ban public gatherings including protests, and shut down ports and airports, all with little oversight.
Introducing the bill in Parliament, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, called it “a departure from the way that we do things in peacetime.” Without appropriate scrutiny, the opportunity to overextend these self-appointed powers is rife. In the same way that sizable contracts to cronies with no apparent justification have been discovered, the government is using the pandemic as a shield for being unaccountable - a scenario that is being seen the world over.
In these unprecedented times, we have conceded control in areas of our lives that would have historically been reserved for Orwellian novels warning of a dystopian future. Currently we are told that there won’t be a national vaccine passport, but many organisations are ‘testing’ the idea. International travel is likely to be the first industry to mandate a COVID passport, possibly with the domestic leisure industry to follow – anything that requires crowds to convene. We will likely run in our droves to acquire this enhanced ID – because the access to both travel and leisure pursuits is all too seductive to resist. With striking similarity to our support of Amazon – the vile and insidious behemoth that is both amazing and terrifying, simultaneously – perhaps it won’t be just our high streets that we surrender as a result of our desires, but our liberties too?
Some may rationalise the logic of a vaccine passport with the idea that it’s not really any different to the existing passport; a globally recognised ID that enables you to travel. We’ve all accepted that this is important, so is it really any different? The answer is an emphatic ‘yes’ - the emergence of a globally recognised ID that demands control over our bodies, in order that we may partake in fundamental rights such as travel and socialising, beggars belief. And it won’t stop there; the next step will be the mandatory vaccination of children. The vast majority, including myself, will take the vaccine and move on, but what if we are then told that our children can’t travel without the same treatments? Will you choose to enforce a very unnecessary vaccine into your children or deny them a holiday?
The WHO statistics on asymptomatic transmission are on very shaky ground, indeed, with children being the least likely to both suffer or transmit. Initially the headlines were that 80% of transmission was a result of non-symptomatic sufferers – this was revised to 15% soon after, without any such headlines to announce this. Now, the data doesn’t seem to support this either. Are you really OK with your kids and grandkids being injected unnecessarily, in order to meet ID requirements? I’m not.
And what will the new normal look like when it comes to addressing the next pandemic, for which we don’t have a cure? Have we really learned anything, other than to lock ourselves away and hide until another vaccine is developed? What if we decide that a life lived in fear is not worth living at all? What if we want to take our chances and live with the risk rather than being siloed? Currently, we don’t have a choice.
The thing I’ve learned in this strangest of years, is that the media lies… constantly. Headlines are propaganda and doom-mongering, either to sell subscriptions or peddle an agenda. Obviously, this has always been a culturally accepted norm among the tabloids, but it has become increasingly obvious to me, since the issues surrounding Brexit with commentary from the BBC asking ‘who are these people voting to leave?’, that even those institutions from which we’d expect a degree of objectivity are barely any different.
Similarly, with the suppression of news stories that didn’t serve the government narrative surrounding lockdown and the pandemic, we are increasingly being subjected to authoritarian messaging peddling fear and indoctrinating compliance. Real journalism seems to be a dying art, and for the real journalists that remain their mainstream platforms for communication are no longer available. This can be seen, yet again, with the current coverage of the Gaza conflict, with the vast majority of Western news agencies unable to report the truth and expose Israel for being no better than the Nazi aggressors that once subjugated their own population. As I write, the French government has announced that protesting against Israeli action in Palestine is now outlawed. The death of free speech is a very dangerous path for us to tread.
We’ve given up our local grocers, our high-street retail and maybe a good portion of our office space – all in the name of progression. But, if we give up our quest for truth, the right to protest and the right to control our bodies and those of our children - if we accept the emerging status quo - it won’t be long before we’re nostalgically looking back on many of our civil liberties in the same way that we remember browsing through the vinyl at HMV.