An interesting set of dominoes is waiting to topple in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As government and business respond by encouraging, then compelling staff to work from home four things are going to happen in inevitable sequence:

Domino 1) The “Oh dear – what now?” phase – 1-3 months from today

1)     ICT departments and business will need to work together rapidly to understand clearly what business use cases can be serviced by the existing remote working model in place in their business.

2)     If 100% of services are candidates for work from home as COVID-19 response and 40% of the workforce use cases can be met – the existing designed ICT capacity might be for 5% of the workforce, this would represent a capacity increase requirement of 700% over the existing remote worker solution. That will need to be delivered in the next 4-6 weeks FROM TODAY for some businesses.

This will knock over the first domino, as virtual desktop environment that are on premise rarely scale well, the next viable option is using a cloud based virtual desktop from Microsoft, Amazon e.t.c. – whilst there is a security risk that needs to be considered in this context, given the scale requirement (700% or more in ICT terms – overnight) there are really no other options to meet the business requirement. The shock waves this will create in ICT power structures will be a fascinating tale of its own.

Domino 2) The “How does this work” phase – 3-6 months from today

Once the workforce is enabled from a technology perspective, who has a laptop, who can access all their business applications through the remote desktop/application solution, how do we work together.

Usage of workplace collaboration tools will need to be taken up in very mature approach, morning video conference team meeting calls, Microsoft teams’ folders for collaboration, work package WIKI’s, etc.

This is not a “we should use this technology” it will be a “In order for the business to continue – we Need to use these remote collaboration tools effectively.” There has never been a compelling event to drive people to use these tools effectively – COVID-19 and a large portion of the workforce being forced to remotely work is that compelling event.

Domino 3) The “Hey, this is working, what now?” phase – 6-9 months from today

Once the COVID-19 panic has passed and everyone is cleared to work from the office again, the penny will have dropped in all workplaces. Bosses who for years insisted, staff can’t be productive working from home, the clock watchers will be proven wrong, the most stubborn personalities will have been forced to make this paradigm work for 1-3 months and be effective with collaboration tools. Business processes around collaboration tools will be in place, the bumps in the adoption will be ironed out, there will be a large portion that is now effective – potentially more efficient, not being in the office.

That part of the workforce will now be able to ask, with authority of their productivity track record of the last couple of months “I want to work from home full time” or even part time and this will create a change in the workforce if even only 50% of the staff returning to the office ask for this – it is still a significant number of the workforce.

Domino 4) The “Hey, there’s an opportunity here!” phase – 9-12 months from today

Once the C level sees – by force of this compelling event that 40% of their workforce don’t need to be in the office – ever - this leads to 2 final and obvious conclusions:

1)     Why do we need to pay for all of this office space?

2)     If we are paying for all of these FTE and it doesn’t really matter where they are, do they need to be onshore, or can their positions be outsourced?

As part of phase 2, the “How does this work” a side effect will be documenting business processes which makes outsourcing labor easy.

The outcome from all of this will be:

All psychological, technical, business process and even HR (insurance) barriers to letting staff work from home should be broken as a result of COVID-19

The long term effect will be a number of organizations using this as opportunity to outsource a large portion of their workforce in the wake of COVID-19 – which will be quite likely as this is already showing to create financial pressures on global stock markets – so there will need to be cost cutting responses to that pressure.

Clearly, this is just one of the outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic, there are going to be many others, but from an internal company structure perspective – not external market factors, which will reshape the marketplace significantly – this is going to be a change that reshapes how businesses work well into the future.

Paul Hovey is Company Owner at Utilis Business Services, a specialist in Enterprise and Business Architectures. https://www.utilisbusiness.com/