Post COVID19: The Next Normal in Technology,

Innovations and Workforce market

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Dr C V Reddy,
Vice Chancellor
K K University, Nalanda
 Change is a Constant

As one non-technology visionary, Charles Darwin, is often credited with having said:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives,

nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one
that is most adaptable to change.”
 The Next Normal in Technology is DIGITAL
Vladimir Lenin “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades
happen.” 

life after the pandemic “is going to be, in many aspects, a sped-up version of the world we knew.” And
this is also applicable to technology and its role at the onset of the pandemic. The pandemic
accelerated the adoption and implementation of many technologies that would have taken years, if
not decades, to become mainstream.

We have seen how we switched from our high-touch, highly analog daily interactions at work, school
and entertainment venues to the exact opposite in a span of few weeks. Clearly, the pandemic
accelerated the dominance of technology in our lives and made us more digital creatures, with all the
advantages and drawbacks therein. 

Clearly, there will be an even faster acceleration of digitalization and automation across the board. We
have seen numerous in-person activities switch quickly and successfully to being delivered online.
From virtual work from home to telehealth, distance learning, online shopping, entertainment,
journalism and virtual physical activities such as yoga and fitness training, many activities managed to
switch to online delivery.
The next normal arrives: Trends that will define 2022—and beyond

2021 will be the year of transition. Barring any unexpected catastrophes, individuals, businesses,
and society can start to look forward to shaping their futures rather than just grinding through the
present.

The crisis sparks a wave of innovation and launches a generation of entrepreneurs

Plato was right: necessity is indeed the mother of invention. During the COVID-19 crisis, one area
that has seen tremendous growth is digitization, meaning everything from online customer service
to remote working to supply-chain reinvention to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine
learning to improve operations. Healthcare, too, has changed substantially, with telehealth and
biopharma coming into their own.
Disruption creates space for entrepreneurs—and that’s what is happening in the United States, in
particular, but also in other major economies. 
 Digitally enabled productivity gains accelerate the Fourth
Industrial Revolution

There’s no going back. The great acceleration in the use of technology, digitization, and new forms of working is going
to be sustained. Many executives reported that they moved 20 to 25 times faster than they thought possible on things
like building supply-chain redundancies, improving data security, and increasing the use of advanced technologies in
operations
More positively, in the past, it has taken a decade or longer for game-changing technologies to evolve from cool new
things to productivity drivers. The COVID-19 crisis has sped up that transition in areas such as AI and digitization by
several years, and even faster in Asia. 
That evolution has not always been a seamless or elegant process: businesses had to scramble to install or adapt new
technologies under intense pressure. The result has been that some systems are clunky. The near-term challenge, then,
is to move from reacting to the crisis to building and institutionalizing what has been done well so far. For consumer
industries, and particularly for retail, that could mean improving digital and omnichannel business models. For
healthcare, it’s about establishing virtual options as a norm. For insurance, it’s about personalizing the customer
experience. And for semiconductors, it’s about identifying and investing in next-generation products. For everyone,
there will be new opportunities in M&A and an urgent need to invest in capability building.
The COVID-19 crisis has created an imperative for companies to reconfigure their operations—and an opportunity to
transform them. To the extent that they do so, greater productivity will follow.
Two major technology trends will accelerate in the post-Covid-19 world: touchless technologies and highly
automated robots that augment human tasks.

It is likely that we will see additional robotic automation and AI in supply chains, customer service and beyond.
With robots, the IoT and the increasing availability of 5G technologies, we will see an array of touchless
technologies take off, such as robots that make your food or drinks.

New devices and technologies will be designed with touchless-first or minimal-human-intervention principles. We
already see examples of the acceleration in touchless technology and AI-driven automation adoption in 
airports with self-service check-in, where passengers create a digital token on their smartphone that can verify their
identity.
But the winner of all accelerated technological categories is biotechnology. Biotechnology made it possible to have
vaccines that are safe with over 90% efficacy in the span of 10 months instead of the 10 years it used to take.

With the publishing of the virus sequence in January 2020, the race began for a vaccine, and various technologies,
such as mRNA, enabled the development of proteins that would bind to the spikes of the virus, preventing it from
binding to human cells and rendering the virus harmless.

Essentially, this revolutionary mRNA technology instructs the human body to make the vaccine itself.

Even more impressive is the fact that mRNA technology could be capable of 
“changing medicine and the pharmaceutical industry as we know it.” It is being studied to treat heart diseases,
cancer and other infectious diseases.

While transformative, mRNA technology has been in the making for over 20 years, but it took a pandemic to be
adopted successfully.

With advanced computer simulation and sequencing tools, it took the biotech company Moderna just two days to
design synthetic mRNA and a month and a half to ship its first batch of vaccines for clinical trials.
This pandemic has indeed been the great accelerator of many technologies and innovations, and it made decades
happen in few weeks.
 Emerging change: As the global pandemic unfolds, experts predict people
will develop greater reliance on swiftly evolving digital tools for good and
for ill by 2025
The pandemic proves that world-up ending phenomena can emerge from anywhere. The turn to living
and working more intensively within digital communications networks shows the value of these
complex systems. The pandemic brings more focus on both the upsides and the downsides of digital
life.

Tele-everything is embraced: The broad adoption of “remote” processes – telework, telemedicine,

virtual schooling, e-commerce and more – is growing. In 2025, there will be more people working from
home, more virtual social and entertainment interactions and fewer forays in public than has been in
the case in recent years.

Humans’ yearning for convenience and safety fuels reliance on digital tools: The pandemic has
rearranged incentives so that consumers will be more willing to seek out smart gadgets, apps and
systems. This will speed up adoption of new education and learning platforms, rearrange work patterns
and workplaces, change family life and upend living arrangements and community structures.
The best and worst of human nature are amplified: The crisis is enhancing digital interconnectedness that engenders
empathy, better awareness of the ills facing humanity and positive public action. On the flip side, some individuals,
cities and nation-states will become more insular and competitive as survival mode kicks in. Xenophobia, bigotry and
closed communities will also increase.
 Innovation in the Next Normal

In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, companies across the industrial spectrum quickly onboarded
digital transformation solutions. For the most part, this was to ensure business continuity. But in the age of
the connected worker, digital solutions can go much further.

As we continue to recalibrate, digital technologies can transform how we innovate. Digital-first strategies
can strengthen inclusivity and expand diversity of thought by allowing more people to contribute, generate
more ideas, and build deeper business relationships. 

There are several routes to unlock digital innovation

1. Promote shorter feedback cycles through digital interaction.
Customer needs and feedback play an important role in spurring innovative thinking.
With no direct experience of supply chains at customer organizations, engineering teams rely on
frontline workers to share their pain points in order to improve industrial processes—by building
out quantifiable metrics, for example. Innovation is now the result of partnership between
organizations. But when engineers can no longer gather on-the-ground evidence from visits to
customer facilities, replicating the process online through virtual walkthroughs and remote, cloud-
based demonstrations can shorten feedback cycles and speed up the exchange of ideas and
feedback.
2. Use quarterly reviews to build a culture of innovation.
Regular accountability can help you build and sustain a culture of innovation.
Pandemic-led change has favored companies that demonstrated lateral thinking with quick pivots.
One way to pivot is to apply processes from one business area to another. An internal business
review is a valuable tool for sales teams to share their achievements and outline their goals.
A similar approach can be applied to innovation.

3. Unleash the virtual hive with a swarm event.

Digital teamwork facilitates problem-solving.
One concept from agile development that can extend beyond the technology industry is “swarming
,” a method in which team members who encounter bottlenecks raise their hands to harness the
hive mind. Every team member stops what they’re doing and converges on the problem, coming at
it from different directions to find a solution. When the problem is solved, the entire team wins.
Swarming can facilitate collective intelligence, real-time collaboration, and improved teamwork
because of fluid leadership roles.
This all-hands-on-deck approach can easily be adapted to the hybrid, global workplace. Your
organization can apply the swarming concept to teams in marketing, finance, and even
manufacturing operations, with spectacular results, particularly in productivity gains.
4. Use virtual hackathons to create products.
Competitions have traditionally provided an incentive for innovative thinking.
During the pandemic, industries as diverse as healthcare, travel, and the arts organized virtual
hackathons to tackle the significant business challenges resulting from the coronavirus outbreak.
Unlike a traditional hackathon, organizing these events virtually allows companies to expand
participation beyond the number of people who can fit in a room—to the entire network, if desired
—resulting in a corresponding increase in the number and variety of ideas. 

5. Bring diversity to the fore with online events.

Leading hackathons and brainstorm events have another benefit: digital inclusivity.
By expanding the events within a digital setting, organizations can truly represent the diversity of
global teams, with participation unlimited by job designation or office location. When physical limits
disappear, exclusivity and unconscious bias can more easily be overcome.
6. Emulate ad hoc hallway encounters.
Collaboration and innovation often result from chance encounters around the coffee machine,
where colleagues can informally discuss work issues or respectfully challenge assumptions—
sparking out-of-the-box solutions on the spot.
These water-cooler conversations are often the hardest to replicate virtually—but a one-on-one
approach may help.
The coronavirus has become one of the greatest accelerators for workplace transformation of our lifetime.  We
started to see how the coronavirus pandemic was going to impact how we work, learn, exercise, shop, and
communicate.

It’s clear now, the pandemic has forced the type of workplace experimentation that would have taken years if not
decades to happen: working remotely, re-thinking business travel and moving in-person training to virtual.

As we head into the 2021 workplace, how we work, where we work, and the technologies we use to stay connected
to team members and customers will change forever. The New Normal of Work has become the Next Normal of
working remotely, learning, working, and collaborating online, and building resilience and inclusiveness in the
workplace.
Just as I have done in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, here is my countdown of what you should include on your
HR agenda for 2021.
 Six steps to reskilling

To make sure that organizations thrive after the crisis, leaders and their teams can take six steps to build
workforce skills now. The first three will help define your strategy and the last three will help you execute it.

1. Rapidly identify the skills your recovery business model depends on

2. Build employee skills critical to your new business model

3. Launch tailored learning journeys to close critical skill gaps

4. Start now, test rapidly, and iterate

5. Act like a small company to have a big impact

6. Protect learning budgets (or regret it later)

 1. Rapidly identify the skills your recovery business model depends on

As companies decide on strategies that will shore up the future of the business, they need to map out which
skill pools will disproportionately affect it and drive it forward. To do this, they should quickly identify crucial
value drivers and employee groups.

Specify the exact contributions of these roles to value creation and reimagine how their day-to-day work will
change as a result of value shifts. Identify which shifts in activities, behavior, and skills are needed. Specify the
quantity and type of people you need.

For example, if you are moving from in-store sales to predominately home deliveries, your tech
team and logistics coordinators will have a greater impact on the new strategy than they did on the
old one. They may also need a different skill set to facilitate the increase in demand and customer
expectations.
 2. Build employee skills critical to your new business model

Start upskilling the critical workforce pools that will drive a disproportionate amount of value in
your adjusted business model.

The first step is to build a no-regrets skill set—a tool kit that will be useful no matter how an
employee’s specific role may evolve.

Focus your investments on four kinds of skills: digital, higher cognitive, social and emotional, and
adaptability and resilience (Exhibit 1).

The skill building in these four areas should be predominately digital and self-paced but not tailored
to the individual in most cases.
Workforce: Build a Skill Set in Key Parts of Business
Respond well to Changes
Workforce: Build a Skill Set in Key Parts of Business Respond well
to Changes
 3. Launch tailored learning journeys to close critical skill gaps

As companies prepare to reimagine and ramp up their business models, it is important to go deeper on strategic
workforce planning. Leaders need a detailed view not only of the core activities that critical groups will begin
undertaking in the next 12 to 18 months but also of which skills each of these groups will need.

And when an international bank realized that its regular face-to-face sales model faced disruption, it concluded that
virtual selling could become a competitive advantage if done well. The bank then began a tailored upskilling journey
for its sales reps to deepen their core sales skills while improving their virtual ways of working.

As the operating model evolves quickly to accommodate a rapidly changing environment, the key is to iterate
strategic workforce planning to determine the right skills to develop in a “just in time” manner. These learning
journeys are tailored to each specific role, but companies can increase their scale and cost effectiveness by delivering
the majority of the training digitally.

Such journeys can be supplemented by digital tools that re-create the best of in-person learning—for instance,
social-sharing tools and live video sessions that create a deepened sense of cohesion in cohorts and help build skills,
such as empathy, that usually depend on in-person learning.
 4. Start now, test rapidly, and iterate

Most companies that had launched successful reskilling programs were better able to address skill gaps caused
by technological disruptions or to implement new business models or strategies.

And companies that viewed their reskilling programs as unsuccessful were still glad they had gone through the
process, with a majority saying they were prepared to take on future skill gaps.

The lesson here is that simply getting started on reskilling programs makes organizations better prepared for
potential future role disruption—and is preferable to waiting (Exhibit 2).
 5. Act like a small company to have a big impact

The reskilling programs at small organizations (fewer than 1,000 employees) are often more successful
than those at large ones, the global survey showed. This may surprise some, since larger companies
generally have access to more resources.

But smaller companies are often more successful at following agile principles—making bold moves more quickly
because they don’t have to shift around large groups of people to try something new. They also may be more
willing to fail, because they have fewer layers of approval to go through.

At the same time, smaller companies tend to have a clearer view of their skill deficiencies, so they’re better at
prioritizing the gaps they need to address and at selecting the right candidates for reskilling. That’s not to say
larger organizations can’t be agile when it comes to reskilling, just that it can be harder for them.
 6. Protect learning budgets (or regret it later)

Companies should not cut their employee-training budgets.

Use your training budget to make skill building a key strategic lever for adapting to the next
normal.

Don’t waste two to three years and forego the efficiency and resilience you could develop now.

What you can and should do is focus on the resilience of your learning ecosystem: make it both
more digital (including in-sync digital components to replace in-person ones) and more accessible
to your employees.

Finally, leverage the ready-made learning journeys and objects of external partners.

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/to-emerge-stronger-from-the-covid-19-crisis-companies-should-start-
reskilling-their-workforces-now