Searching for post-pandemic relevance: How Covid-19 has accelerated digital adoption

The emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic has caused widespread disruption on an unprecedented scale for many businesses around the world. It has also catapulted new businesses towards digital transformation - revealing new practices and strategies that can bring new relevance for businesses in front of their audiences. 

Businesses have surprised themselves with the speed and success of their digital transformation in reaction to Covid-19. Generally speaking, digital offerings have leapfrogged many years of progress in the space of just 12 months. 

One of the most significant factors driving this change is the fundamental transformation of customer behaviour and a sizable shift towards online channels. Throughout lockdown, consumers have embraced the idea of using eCommerce for all of their purchasing needs - from buying groceries to making financial transactions. 

The sheer extent to which digital jobs are growing even outside of traditional tech companies is stark when comparing job postings between now and around five years ago. When comparing and contrasting how workforces have changed, it’s clear to see that sectors relating to data science and analytics are growing alongside the development of impactful AI and machine learning technology. This growth enables more companies to benefit from insights from inside and outside of tech. 

In light of this cultural shift towards embracing digital adoption, let’s take a deeper look into the new strategies and practices that are helping tech companies to stay relevant for their audience in a new era for custom:

Bracing for the era of the ‘new normal’

For lots of companies, customers have already undergone some form of digital migration. Employees are already working fully remotely and are capable of displaying some form of agility. Furthermore, companies have already looked to launch analytics and AI initiatives within their operations, whilst IT teams have delivered at a rate of acceleration that has never been seen before. However, for most companies, these changes simply represent the first phase of a necessary transformation. 

It is clear that digital transformation is key in keeping up with, and outpacing, competitors at a time where the adoption of new technologies can lead to significant amounts of ground being won and lost in this new business landscape. 

Some essential points for modernisation revolve around data security, cloud functionality and insourcing practices, so let’s look at how these industry specifics will need to be addressed in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic:

The new era of collaboration and the virtual office

While Covid-19 has led to more of us spending our time at home, we have also seen a surge in sales of augmented reality and virtual reality technology. It is this development of AR and VR that may be the key for the future of digital collaboration once we arrive at the dawn of the ‘new normal.’

Hiring and onboarding new employees will change forever if we are to remain working in remote environments, but the digital age has a way of bringing workers closer together - even into the same virtual room at the same time - without anybody having to move a muscle. 

An example of what the future of remote collaboration may look like is found in Spatial, a 3D holographic workplace designed to bring employees together in a much more engaging way. As the platform’s founder, Anand Agarawala, explains: “It used to be that if you wanted to jam on an idea or get creative, you would get in a room with someone, even to the extent you would take a flight to do that. With VR and AR we can put on a headset and feel like we are in the same room as someone.” Agarawala has labelled his creation “a 3D version of Zoom meets Slack.”

Life after the pandemic will come with new challenges in how employees communicate with one another and train in their roles. Reality technology has offered an insight into how virtual offices could operate and may not only open up more jobs in the digital sector but also enable companies to look much further afield in their recruitment plans. Hiring managers can also adapt job specifications safe in the knowledge that new starters can receive sufficient training regarding their roles. It is now possible simply to put on some AR or VR enabled eyewear, and actively shadow workers and conduct hand-on tasks under comprehensive supervision. 

In the era of the remote office, data and analytics has risen to the forefront of how businesses operate. From gauging employee performance to monitoring how consumers use their website, gone are the days where we can physically monitor customers entering our brick and mortar stores - or look out for any workers who are not engaging in as much screen time in the office. 

Analysing data helps us to understand how our companies work. One example of a company acting fast to adapt to the rapidly changing digital landscape can be found in Freeport-McMoRan, which has cobmbined AI with the institutional knowledge of its engineers to adapt its operations. Chief operating officer, Harry Conger, has stated that real-time data is allowing Freeport to lower its operating costs and become stronger in the face of the challenging economic climate, claiming that “a learn-fast culture means we put things into action,” and that “we do not sit around thinking about it.”

Cloud reliance in a remote world

Clearly there is no good time for the world to experience a pandemic; but from a technological point of view, it is perhaps fortunate that Covid-19 struck at a time when cloud computing is a very recent development. As a result, rather than simply profiting from the time of a global health crisis, much of the tech industry has been exposed to one of the most widespread use cases for cloud technology imaginable. 

In 2020, office workers have had the ability to rapidly adapt to remote working environments in their millions to help keep their sectors operational where several years ago it simply would not have been possible. The investment and ongoing work of hyperscalers over recent years have been a driving force for this. 

We can also see the growth of connectivity continuing to accelerate as we emerge from the other side of the pandemic, as more organisations opt to continue relying on SaaS tools. With cloud infrastructures becoming more diverse - especially with applications adding more laters of complexity, businesses will be looking at ways to strengthen their own infrastructure. 

This growth will be achieved through establishing deeper visibility across IT estates, ensuring workloads have access to the required resources, and running systems that connect and protect at a distributed level of scale - from on-prem to hybrid cloud solutions. 

With this in mind, the biggest challenge facing cloud providers as we move away from the pandemic will be customer retention. 
The transformation of reshoring

Covid-19 has been a trigger for reshoring decisions. With this in mind, it is likely to continue fostering and accelerating decisions that have not been made yet - even if possible drivers had already been identified. 

In the short term, companies and governments may simply react to the current climate using reshoring to revise their current operations with little change to their future strategy. In this manner, reshoring will simply be a way to cope with the current challenges they face. 

Other organisations will consider the current situation in a more long-term perspective by revising their strategies. Over time, it may be that two different approaches to reshoring emerge. Policies at a single-firm level will become easier to be implemented, more popular in a political sense but not equipped to solve the problems that many industries faced during the COVID-19 emergency breakdowns. 

Focusing on a supply chain perspective will be vital for businesses to cope with sudden variations and to increase its resilience, responsiveness and restoration capabilities. Furthermore, it may become harder to attract an entire supply chain within one single country’s boundaries, meaning that more cooperation with nations in close macro-regions could become a significant advantage in favouring near-shoring initiatives. 

The pandemic has affected businesses differently over the past year. Some companies have struggled to adapt to the new digital landscape due to limitations within the industry or through a lack of resources, while others have excelled in ending their operations digitally.

To facilitate your company’s adaptability in this digital environment, it may be worth hiring new skilled employees to bolster your ecommerce and cybersecurity team or prepare you for cloud adoption.

If you are looking to recruit within the technology sector submit a job spec today. Alternatively, if you would like to contact one of our specialist recruitment consultants to discuss this, as well as any other general queries or to improve your recruitment process, please get in touch today.