HOW WORKING REMOTELY IS SHAPING THE NEXT NORMAL

It’s starting with ‘O’ and we will conclude this ‘O’ later in this blog. Also, we have entered into the third year of the deadly pandemic, disruptions are like vestigial organs with a facet-view that we don’t need but they are still there. Moving from the institutional ‘New Normal’ to hard-hitting real ‘Next Normal’, organizations of every scale are prepping themselves through inculcating CRM software in their work culture. As they don’t want any leaky buckets from where the profits will drain by sudden lockdown announced by hurting economic sentiments. And the concern towards that ‘O’ we mentioned earlier is definitely not being ‘O’ffline.

Taking a stand on it, our Global Director – Retail Strategy remarks on the industry by recollecting his thoughts, “I heard from my dad to learn faster, to get a good job, and to make a livelihood out of that. The lessons I was taught, I can’t pass it to my next generation as effectively they were on me. The learnings and answers for tomorrow would be different from those we don’t know today. From nursery kids to everyone passing through that window, we learn things together. Through this transition, we may have lost a lot of strings but at the same time, we have gained a lot. For the right mix to move ahead, again I question closely on the relatability. Lastly, if I split the industry into three parts – International, National, and Regional, we see three different aspects, three different stories, and everybody is trying to find the answer in their way. Also, nobody knows how exactly we gonna be closer to the context. So, we all hit and try every day and try to find out where our thinking went wrong. One becomes the learning for tomorrow and sets a practice for the rest of the industry to follow. But in the end, the only thing matters is to reach the right answers faster and who’s trying harder for that.”

To begin with, if we rewind the tape of the virus to its start, we can see the discomfort while adapting to the new corporate culture, but we were not aware of that ‘O’ though we were having the acute shortage of that life gas i.e. ‘O’xygen which starts with this letter but it will be revealed later in this listicle. Managing pipelines with daily chores was a kind of dodge that we all were experiencing. Recently, the video of New Zealand’s Prime Minister went viral as her child was peeping in while she was attending a video call.

“Some scientists have even gone as far as calling the skin a "social organ". This makes good intuitive sense: we both crave touch and are repulsed by it when it is unwanted, uninvited, or inappropriate. Even simple, brief touches on a hand or arm can have tremendous effects.” ¬ - (BBC.com - Why Humans and Animals Rely on Social Touch)

Through evolutions and the above-mentioned comment, we have acknowledged that humans are social creatures that can’t live without interacting with each other. But in this time of difficulty, we figured out a way through video calls, and that’s the way we are ‘O’n-line with each other. Even the social events were converted into virtual events, be it corporate meetings, conferences, weddings, product launches, baby showers, and much more… everything was through that fiber of the internet. But that ‘O’ is yet to be concluded.

To make the faces happy, balloting (all over the world) too featured this practice by arranging virtual rallies where the accomplishment of the mission is contradictory and they are not mentioning that ‘O’ in their agendas.

But now the question is - How long till we have to attend these virtual events?

The answer lies in our daily routines and our social habits. We (humans) also feature a unique paradoxical state of mind, and that’s of getting habitual to circumstances very easily from our ‘O’rigin. People do take advantage of this habit but let it go for now.

The adaption again is with us while working on minute things daily. It’s not curbing the virus only but we are liking to be in this (virtual) space. As getting on the system and jotting our pipelines and updates with a safe/less physical to-and-fro.

The retail industry has also witnessed a huge drift while working in virtual space. Immersive technologies are being included more often to inculcate the experience factor in brand narratives. Brick-and-mortars have emerged with a new approach and they infuse digital interfaces to map their consumer behavior journey more effectively. And, as a retail design agency, we are talking about that ‘O’ in the form of O2O i.e. ‘O’nline to ‘O’ffline with an H2H (Human to Human) approach.

Debriefing 2021, according to a Mckinsey report, India’s logistics sector needs structural reforms more than ever. And that’s true because the way COVID-19 has impacted the Indian economy had bulged out many leaky buckets in our system. The lessons ‘New Normal’ has taught us should be implemented in the ‘Next Normal’ so that we can never leave our ‘Normal’ again to any collusion.

Going on with predictive that this new highly mutative variant (starting with the ‘O’ too) won’t impact the health and overwhelm the healthcare system like the previous one. But who knows what we are going to witness in the future. Working in virtual space will definitely, continue for a long time until we will binge a series about how this pandemic ended, relaxing in our comforts.