Post-COVID-19. What can we expect to happen next?

When I am writing this, I am 32 years old and there has never been a year like this one in my entire life. I never saw societies being so close and distant at the same time. I never saw such crazy things happening at the world scale. In other words, this is the first worldwide crysis in my adult life. But every crysis has a tendency to unleash opportunities and perspectives that were hidden behind our daily routines. In this post I want to think on what COVID taught us, what was revealed to us, and how the world could(should) change after situation will stabilize.

I am going to structure this post as multiple independent(mostly) domain-specific sections so that you can easily pick one you are interested at most.

1. Work from anywhere
2. Advancements in communication tools
3. Medicine
4. Public services
5. Logistics and goods delivery
6. Stress management
7. Global mobility
8. Online socialization
9. Remote education
10. Conclusion

Work from anywhere

This is started to happen before COVID, especially in the technology sector. For years, there were very successful companies like GitLab or Red Hat, proving that large organizations can work in a remote-first fashion. When pandemic hit us, it just accelerated the course we were already on, and additionally, demonstrated its potential to other businesses.

In general it works at scale, but to reach a true workforce mobility, there is still a lot needs to be done:

1. It is not entirely clear how to hire in such conditions. Especially how to hire young specialists right out of university? Subconsciously, it is easier to hire a seasoned worker remotely, because, by definition, they should be more independent(usually). For younger professional, you might expect more help to be needed and learning curve being steeper, because the ecosystem of remote work did not reach its maturity yet and might be not beginner-friendly(for vast majority of companies). I believe this is mostly a mental shift that will happen over time, but we are definitely not there yet.
2. There are a lot of uncertainties around legal aspect of remote-first companies. Things like tax paying are coming into play. Also, even very mature remote-first companies only allow people to work from the certain countries, so we still have a sort of location lock, which is often not really required, in my opinion.
3. Another important piece is lack of frameworks around building a remote company culture. If you will just hire remote workers and assign them work, it will be like a 3rd party contracting agency without any soul and sense of belongness. Check out an incredible eBook from GitLab about this topic.
4. Social aspect of work - like a regular chatting about life, exchanging ideas etc. All of that could be done online for sure (with some adaptation), but it also requires a mental shift to happen first, because I can clearly see how to some people, it could look very stupid to have a remote coffee break. At least it felt weird to me first time and I am rather a kind of always-online person ;)
5. Putting technology sector aside, other industries need much more help in transforming their work processes to allow people to work remotely(if the want to). Organizations, like banks, insurance companies, governments, etc could also introduce remote work as an option to their employees. Not only can it level up people's flexibility and work life balance, but it will also help building trust between employers and employees in more conservative businesses.

With that said, it is worth noticing that some companies figured all of that already. However, there is no "best practice" on how to operate a remote company, and it would be very good to have more knowledge sharing about it.

Advancements in communication tools

The era or remote communications started very long time ago. But the way I see it is that remote communication was always considered to be a "backup plan", or at least, communication in-person was preferable all the time. This has radically changed this year and although it might get relaxed post-covid, we clearly observed how many things we can do better in our communications tools:

1. Accessability and UX - Zoom(video calls company) did not do anything that special to beat its competitors. The key differentiator was that they provided a very clean ecosystem for online calls, which could be relatively easy adopted by enterprises. They also did a good work on audio quality. It's all hard work, but you see, nothing novel from the user standpoint. And yet, people valued it so much, that despite of endless security flaws and lack(for a very long time) of end to end encryption, Zoom became a de-facto standard (at least in US and EU) for video calls, online conferences, sport classes, etc. So far, I do not even know who could be compared to Zoom experience, so there is definitely room for improvement for its competitors.
2. AR in online-meetings - very new area with Zoom(again) being currently hyped with its virtual backgrounds. It looks so dead simple, but when you think about it, it literally gives you so much flexibility and adds such a huge value, especially in a situation when you might share the room you work in with your family(not ideal, but common, this is how it is for huge amount of people). I can see how in future, more AR could be used to back up a meeting context or to create a stronger sense of presence. We are clearly just testing the waters here.
3. Breaking boundaries between tools - why can't we call from Zoom to Skype and invite a WhatsApp user into the conference? Clear, some additional features might be missing, but at least the main one - communication, could be still available. We still do not have a solid definition of how online communications should look like technology-wise. As a result, every company is building its own things without leveraging or developing open standards. Google did a great work with WebRTC, providing a communication standard for web platform, but native apps are missing such things and have to reinvent same stuff over and over again, including already known security issues. I can clearly see how in future, online communication companies could shift towards open standards and focus on added value, instead of creating more communication protocols.
4. Culture in online communications - usually, it is clear how to behave in person to not piss people off. We have our intonation, facial expressions, gestures, etc. But in chat you only have letters, punctuation and smileys. In voice call you have your speech and intonation. What I am saying is that amount of communication channels is significantly smaller and it is much harder to deliver your message with a proper attitude. It is better with video, but still it's not like being in front of the person yet (see AR section). So it's more like a soft skills domain, but I feel this is very important to think about it early, if you want to adopt more remote work into your life.

Medicine

Disclaimer: by no means I want to insult medical industry here. What I am about to say is that current situation revealed some bottlenecks which were not clear to most of the people before. So in order to evolve, we need to think critically for a bit and see what can we do to handle such events better in future.

I got really shocked while listening the TED2015 talk by Bill Gates about the world being not ready for the next pandemic event. Definitely recommend to watch it, some things sound like he really predicted a future.

Keeping vaccine race(a purely political race, btw) aside, entire situation in medical sector looked like logistical disaster to me. It's clear, lots of people, including medical personal, simply freaked out and stopped behaving rationally, but isn't it where humanity's accumulated experience in medicine should've become extremely handy? And yet, every country did their own stuff, did not share anything significant and as the pandemic spread across the world, every country kept making same mistakes and hitting same bottlenecks as if it would be the first case in the world.

Now, I am of course just an individual, thinking loud here and clearly having not enough information to be objective, but, this is what I think we can do better:

1. Providing more logistical tools for medical industry, especially in mission-critical scenarios. This was originally a great idea from earlier mentioned TED talk - letting military services and medical services collaborate more closely. Former are good in moving fast and later are good in... well, medicine - sounds like a perfect team to me.
2. Depolitization of medicine - sorry, but we are talking about human lives and mental health(at scale) here, and it is simply stupid to not share efforts on vaccine creation. Instead, what we have now(November 2020) is literally a race for some imaginary trophy. And not just a race, but race where only certain countries are considered to be participants. It does not look right to me at all. Eventually, World Health Organization (WHO) could evolve into something what is country agnostic, backed up by the entire world's resources(including intellectual ones) with the sole purpose of make all of us healthier.
3. More tooling for medical information and research sharing. We've got a lot of good things like GDPR and other privacy initiatives, but it looks like in some cases they actually stop us from moving forward. Even simple things took months in EU. Like the contact tracing app wasn't in place for months and upon implementation had a lot of privacy buzz around it, concerning how hard it is to share contact tracing info even within EU. Note, nobody seems to be even thinking about having such tools available globally - it is just a bureaucrat's paradise nowadays.
4. Deeper work with medical simulations - like what would happen if...? Will medical system manage the load? Will insurance program manage the load? Lot's of this questions could be answered with decent accuracy when doing simulations. Some institutions are definitely doing it already, but clearly, more countries should invest into such research, given that certain countries medical structures performed way better than others.

Public services

Speaking clearly as a "user" here. However, I was truly amazed how, despite of having(presumably in theory) all the tools, governments were failing in talking to people.

It felt like governments are only know how to apply brute physical force to the problem: put masks on, deploy troops on streets to catch people without masks, introduce fines, close organizations. Further on, they simply delegated clearly incompetent business owners to decide what's allowed in their walls and what is not. At scale, it only ended up in frustration and anxiety. Well, I hope masks helped to some extent, but it's not the point. What I am saying is that nobody really tried to educate population how to behave in such unseen scenario.

During the pandemic, I did an experiment couple of times - at the certain point I tried to figure out what are the current behavioral guidelines in my city (Berlin, Germany). I failed most of the time... The only thing one can find is some articles in online newspapers, blog posts, semi-official news, but nothing truly official - it all looked just speculative and fishy.

So to me it looks like our governments require more support from the industry to establish a proper communication processes in case of emergencies. Could be simple things like:

1. Using Google(or any other search engine) cards to highlight official information - this is actually happening now already
2. Applying social media marketing techniques known for decades already. It would increase the reach and more importantly reach people how do not watch TV or listen radio (hey, there are lots of us already)
3. Providing a strong informational support about why decisions are made - people do not want to simply follow rules they do no understand. Right now, most of the decisions are just thrown to the local authorities and they implement it blindly. Giving people more context in an approachable way will only help to build politically educated society, which really cares about what is happening in their city/country. Politicians are saying a lot that younger population is careless, not responsible and what not. Well, maybe they just need to talk to us in a way we would understand? I am just a single example, but I am getting older and my level of understanding of what governments are doing and why is not growing with me. Quite opposite, actually.
4. Shift towards data-driven decisions on the government level. In Europe, it took almost a half an year to implement contact tracing apps. I really do not understand why would one need so much time to do it. There are policies, data protection acts and stuff like that, but in the emergency situation there should be means to roll out such system faster. Or even better, it should have been created before, as a result of research simulation. Nowadays, anything what is related to privacy in medicine is unnecessary complex, requires paperwork on both ends and just slow. We are losing so much historical data now and it should stop.

Logistics and goods delivery

This is actually the area where in my opinion we did really great. Infrastructure was at place, companies were staffed already. To my opinion, online delivery is a completely underestimated industry (by governments) in pandemic times. Most of the companies just did great but it would be really cool to see more cooperation between online delivery enterprises and authorities. There are nice examples of such cooperations already, like Berlin's Delivery Hero working with authorities across the world to help with delivery of literally everything

Other things we could think about are:

1. More Contact-free deliveries - there are some guidelines on how to do it already, but we can try to eliminate a human factor here, by providing something like a per-house facility to receive deliveries. Think of it as your robotized concierge service, which is available 24/7.
2. Use machines to deliver goods - drone delivery started to prove itself to be a feasible option, but we are still far away from a fully functional system. I think primarily due to per-country official regulations and lack of standards to comply with. This is definitely going to change in future. For instance I would love to see a delivery network, delivering goods to the tallest building's roofs in the area for collection. It would not bother any people and reduce traffic for sure.
3. More online services for less conventional goods - for instance, medical supplies. It is possible already, but process of obtaining a prescription and passing it to the vendor is messy and complicated. This is one of the "low-hanging" fruits technology-wise, because we know how to do it already. It's just that it has to be done right from the medical/insurance standpoints. One example of such service in reality is a freshly released Amazon Pharmacy, which is hiding a lot of logistical complexity from you, providing a seamless experience to obtain even prescription-based medical supplies.

Stress management

It feels like COVID also served as a catalyst for stress management and mental health industries. All this pandemic stuff is clearly hard to handle - a lot of people lost their jobs, relatives, friends or just feel anxious. I think, starting from 2020, we can start observing commoditization for things like meditation, stress management trainings and more basic education about anxiety and how to battle it. A lot of people were simply not ready for such a shake up and we need to make sure that mental health education will receive a priority it deserves.

Global mobility

In the mobility domain, COVID shown us how far we are from having an optimal system. Just picture it in your mind: a regular day in some major airport: huge lines, people are crowding around counters, security control is messy and sometimes simply unhygienic - such system can't operate in emergency conditions, it is just not organized enough. I think in future we have to rethink how we handle global mobility and improve couple of things:

1. Design public spaces, taking social distancing into account. There are already a lot of studies about that and framework are starting to shape up. I think now, it is a matter of time before such smart public space design will become the new norm.
2. Streamlining end-to-end experience for travellers. It could include filling up and answering all questions remotely(independent of your residence) in advance and using less archaic ways to do a security work in public transport network. What I mean here is more automated process, mitigating a possibility of large crowd being stuck somewhere in the corridor. For instance, in Germany, there is a system to go via automatic face recognition and passport scanning gate(even for international destinations). It's not available everywhere yet, but it is getting more and more popular.
3. More exploration around alternative ways to go from A to B. We will see how Musk's Boring Company will do the future. Faster trains is also an option - Maglev trains starting to gain more attention around the world. Even rather conservative Germany has started to look into Maglev technology.

Online socialization

COVID also shown us how many real things could be replicated online. It might be not that exciting and not exactly the way activity was designed to be, but, at least you can get something and it is often better than nothing. Sport, activities, online dinners, coffee breaks, educational programs. So despite of COVID being a major bummer of the year it helped making some things more accessible to the larger crowd, which is not bad at all.

Great example is some major online conferences, which went fully online(and often free) in 2020. Such events were often unavailable for younger specialists due to high costs and a need to travel far away. Now, it is at least possible to get an idea about quality of such events and a type of audience you can meet there - it is clearly a new opportunity for a lot of people.

But despite of having all the tools to conduct major events fully online, we are still lacking a full experience of an offline event. Some things could be done though:

1. Provide more tools for online speakers to engage with their audience and track an instant feedback.
2. Provide more opportunities for online networking. This is a soft area where we have to be creative and think out of the box to come up with some special formats to facilitate online conversations during large events. Could be things like break-out rooms, polls, interactive slides etc. Again, we have all that, it's just that there are more opportunities in providing end-to-end solutions for serious online events.

Remote education

During COVID times, a lot of countries started to experiment with remote education. I think we are still far away to be able to do primary education in a fully remote away, but this is clearly becoming a feasible option nowadays. Personally, I am not convinced that fully remote primary education could work, yet. Main reason is that it is very hard to manage audience engagement online and provide help for struggling students. Also, a lot of people are having hard times to concentrate when working/studying from home. In addition, there are still things like examinations, which is very hard to do online(if you care about quality). Last but not least, in certain sciences, as e.g. psychology or philosophy it is essential to have a live conversation and observe non-verbal signs - it is still very hard to do it online.

With that said, I do not think online education makes no sense. Quite opposite. But for now, I would consider it to be just another tool. Clearly, we will see more and more institutions experimenting with remote education, but we have to be careful here, since too many things in education are designed for offline experience now. I would say 2020 served as a very expensive marketing campaign for online education and clearly made people more aware about opportunities to obtain additional knowledge while staying at home. And this is a very good thing to begin with.

Conclusion

I always try to stay optimistic in life. This was rather bad year for our society, but we learned a lot. We must keep moving forward, backed up by this experience. We must take the best even from this terrible event. I strongly believe that current situation has a potential to make us stronger, make our borders thinner and unite people. Together we can do great things! Stay safe ;)

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