Many young people started new businesses creating custom masks, others, who were already moving significantly in this direction, have established their presence in areas as diverse as gaming advisors, writers, podcasters, game scenario authors, educational content creators, online coordinators, data journalists, modelers and so forth. Some of those people may go back to their day jobs, many of them probably won’t, because they recognize that the dead-end jobs that they were in weren’t going anywhere (and likely no longer are supportable).
My expectation is that companies, many companies, will try to revive their onsite business activity, but will end up with real occupancy at about 35%. This is around the level that companies that have successfully transitioned over to work-from-home maintain, with most of that being managers. Most of the creative, administration and technical staff will likely end up fighting hard to not go back to the office on a regular basis, though they may end up going in one or two times a week.
Another shift I expect to see is that employees (local) will migrate to a 4/10 work week, with two days onsite, two days offsite, and three days for a long weekend. What is likely to happen as well is that companies may very well split incoming into base wages and cost-of-living allowances or COLA (a move that Facebook has proposed) for remote workers. This might be considered unfair at worst, but is actually a fairly decent compromise, as it splits the difference of location arbitrage between the employee and the employer.
The real lesson to be learned here is that the Pandemic has, ironically, been an accelerant. It has pulled us into the future by perhaps five or six years because we had to. The effects of the Pandemic will fade, but as it recedes, it’s leaving a very changed landscape. Having let the genie out of the bottle, getting it back in will likely prove beyond possible.
The office is dead. We can officially retire the water cooler.