COLUMNS

Paradigms that the COVID-19 health contingency will shift in business... and everyone’s lives

By: Salvador Meza *

Have you considered why we are now working more and producing less? There is no supplier, client, colleague, or friend nowadays who isn’t making comments about how they are busier at work now than before the COVID-19 health crisis, despite working from home.

After-hours meetings that extend beyond normal business hours. Video calls and sales follow-up with clients for whom a simple email used to be enough. Virtual planning and re-planning meetings to adjust the budget to the reality of COVID-19 every month, or even every week. These are examples of how people are working more while performing less, as shown by the monthly income and growth results of companies.

This “extra” effort people are putting into work is mainly due to trying to adjust to a different operating structure than the one they had previously developed, which was probably not unlike their parents’. The shift toward information technologies (IT) does not end at just downloading an app to communicate using computers or mobile phones. It involves changing our way of thinking and seeing human relationships as something that now is becoming integrated into automated

digital processes in which recognition, understanding, and even love are transmitted through a simple “Like” or a double tick that signals a message has been read.

This adaptation process will require breaking long-standing paradigms that would certainly have taken years or even a couple of generations to disappear if not for this health crisis, especially among the highest-level executives in companies and corporations, the oldest of whom have traditionally been less prone to adopt digital tools. For them, information technologies seemed to be only for computer

experts, employees and collaborators of software development companies, or for “young people” who spend all their time on their mobile devices to the point of messaging online despite being physically just a few meters away from each other.

But truth is that digital technologies have been available for a long time. What this sanitary confinement has revealed is that fully embracing them brings us the prospect of a life with greater expectations and benefits than we could have ever imagined. One example of this is the ability to work from home. From one day to the next, we discovered that we didn’t really “need” to go to the office every day, and even that not every employee needed to work at the office. The collapse of this paradigm has made life easier for millions of people around the world who used to waste “dead” hours in long, daily commutes in heavily-congested cities.

Instead of wasting two hours a day in their car or on the train, people now have regained that time to eat breakfast with their children, get some exercise, or sleep longer. And this is without taking into account the benefit of increased air quality in our cities, just from a single change in our way of thinking and seeing life.

What this change in paradigms actually means, is that we are going to have to adapt to a new way of working and a new way of life in one or two years, when this would have usually taken humanity one or two generations.

It also means that we will have to pick up our pace because we have to learn many things in a very short time. We have to adapt to, and embrace information technologies today. All the mental barriers we had, all those excuses against dedicating time to adopt digital tools, like, “That is not for me,” “I’m not interested in that,” “I don’t need that,” “We should continue doing things as before,” “I prefer things in print,” “I need to see people face to face,” they no longer make sense.

That is why it seems we are now working more and producing less or—at best—the same. It’s because we are building the new labor and social world that will exist for the next 20 or 30 years. We are shaping the structures that will bring us cohesion and meaning in our “new” lives. Without planning for it or even realizing it, we are fully entering the Digital Transformation. Welcome!

Salvador Meza is Editor & Publisher of Aquaculture Magazine, and of the Spanish language industry magazine Panorama Acuicola.