It is evident by now that the face of business has changed — Corporations large and small are scrambling to pick up the various pieces lost after succumbing to 18 months of business restrictions worldwide.
Now comes the challenge of rebuilding, but smart business leaders are not going back to where they once were. New technologies as a result of 5g technology and real-time speed have enabled businesses to change the way they do business. The term “digital transformation” comes into play here where the use of digital tools can replace human work, planning, interfacing and save vital time.
Embracing Change
One of the main areas impacted by the entire pandemic has been human mentality. A shift has taken place in the minds of many about safety and the viability/risks of every job they could ever do moving forward. This has placed pressure on any industries requiring manpower in order to do business. Add to this the fact that governments were forced to hand out relief to save the livelihoods of their citizens, which put free money into the hands of workers and helped shape the mentality shift towards the work from home movement, or just not working at all. We are left with companies needing workers, and employees deciding not to work.
As a global society, we will be faced with how to transform businesses into more high functioning entities without losing the relation of workmanship and keeping employees paid for a thriving economy.
The Idea Of Going Local
One unique and seemingly positive aspect that has resulted from the coronavirus pandemic is the idea of bringing all necessities back to a local level. With borders closed, ships getting stuck in canals and worldwide lockdowns, many supply chain vulnerabilities have been exploited over the past year that cause turmoil when supplies run out. Retail businesses closed when products ran out, the economy slowed even more, and people were left needing unavailable items.
Governments at the local level have been forced to re-evaluate how their cities are run as businesses fiscally to make sure that important PPE, food, housing, supplies and the raw materials that make them are always available for the local industries to supply locally.
Large corporations have fallen victim to these delays in supply, causing prices on goods to go up, availability to drop, and an important realization that we cannot rely on everybody else to make everything for us, we have to as a society learn to not lose sight of progress and take care of our own lives.
The supply chain shortages have led to many companies re-shoring their products that they sent overseas during the offshoring boon — forcing them to take a humanitarian approach above the sights of maintaining profits. It has now become more important to governments to supply the local industries even if it means profits suffer, to make certain the public best interests are met. Governments are working with businesses to bring it back home.
Virtual Meetings
“If you haven’t been to one, you haven’t lived!”
This interesting progression of technology during crisis is so interesting because it shows the resilience of humankind. Think about this, before 2008, we used msn messenger to send texts to our friends and to communicate on a semi-real-time level. There were constraints on data speed, size and the capabilities of computers. Video file sharing was not an option. Fast forward just 13 years and we have 5g bandwidths and computers in our pockets. We share data, videos, large files in seconds at ease. When crisis came, humans automatically shifted to using the new technology.
This technological increase allowed the streaming of video data sizes in real-time which paved the way for virtual teams meetings.
We may take for granted the systems operating today, but now is our chance to embrace a better way. As humans, we naturally aim to put regular processes on autopilot as we expand our lives to save time, so this movement to essentially innovate the classic “meeting” runs parallel to our intentions as we innovate life. Meetings now take a more streamlined approach with location becoming obsolete, time saved, and more work getting completed.
Intention
When the crisis of the pandemic began, businesses started becoming very intentional with everything they decided for their companies to protect their workers, profits, and public image. Doing what was best for more than just the bottom line has become the main focus.
Automation that was too expensive for industries to implement is no longer viewed as such. The investments make sense today where they did not before the crisis because of new restrictions at workplaces, unavailable workers, and an overall efflux of human labor. Companies can now see how their businesses can become more resilient to market changes with proper intentions.
Becoming a more sustainable, self-stabilizing company is desirable when supply chains cannot be guaranteed.
Going Digital
The idea of the digital transformation comes as a result of innovating the backbone systems controlling our online experiences. Algorithms dictate much of what we see, how we influence others through marketing, and our overall digital reach as businesses.
If we can learn to understand how these systems work for us, we can best use them for our benefit if we can transform how we do things to excite them.
There are some basic facts about how these algorithms function:
- More people see content when a page loads fast. As of may 2021, a new standard has been released by google about the loading times of webpages.
- Your posts have limited reach that is dictated by the velocity of viewers when it is posted. Meaning, when you release content, if it is not enticing enough to generate interest instantly, it will not be seen by as many people.
- In concert with #2, the more “regular” you keep your channel the more people can begin seeing your content. This means post every Tuesday, every week if tuesday is your content release day. Maintaining efficacy as a channel is determined by showing the algorithm that you will continue giving information regularly and on time.
- Visibility is everything. All of these small steps equal whether or not a company finds you when they search on google.
There used to be a single google ranking system for all webpages on the internet. The rank was determined by how much content, how many links were connected to that content, and how many viewers you could generate to your page. This all has changed as social networks emerge, corporate buyouts create conglomerate organizations, and data becomes a commodity.
Today, Everything determines your visibility on google. Since every part of the system run on algorithms now, we can slowly shift our efforts to use them to our advantages still with the same goal — providing the best, true, fastest information to anyone about anything.
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