Interesting article on the financial and social impact on businesses in the event of an hn51 human crossover outbreak.
I’ve talked about this several times with clients – not because I’m a pandemic specialist, but because we were moaning about how companies still mistrust home working and/or the culture of offices requires physical congregation.
So (god forbid) there’s a mass outbreak – will the forced home working and remote collaboration prove the viability of web-based technologies?
Apart from the emergency services and crucial financial etc. networks, and of course, the physical movements of food, materials etc, how will the non essential ‘knowledge companies’ manage?
I think pretty well. The affluent countries, with internet penetration and home PCs are probably pretty well prepared from an infrastructure perspective.
Ironically, most companies I see in action, work entirely on email, even if they’re in the same building/floor/team/desk configuration. But the cultural and skills required to effectively knowledge share and collaborate remotely don’t seem to exist in a lot of organisations.
Email isn’t a robust enough platform in the event of a sudden forced ‘stay at home’ policy – should companies be investing their team’s time into using tools such as Basecamp, blogs and wikis, to change their collaborative workflow and culture now?