The unprecedented challenges of 2020 made enterprises reach and rise to new levels. It is the organization’s plasticity to compose and transform into the new normal. The focus of 2021 predictions for businesses rests on the new consumer and enterprise. It is about people centricity, resilient delivery, and location independence.
New consumer
2021 will see an ever-evolving consumer need, an unprecedented personalized shopping season, pushing lifestyle choices to the limit, people rationalizing choices daily over changing priorities, enhanced moments that matter every day. This will be exhibited in huge website traffic on eCommerce websites over the huge black Friday queues the night before in the cold. People will focus on health rather than travel; exercise at home using video apps than visiting fitness centers; spend time with loved ones with indoor activities and games; cook with each other at home rather than travel and trekking adventures and outdoor concerts and events; buy secondary monitors and comfortable chairs for setting work from home setups and get rebates adding to the overall increase in personal financial savings. People will move away from cities and settle in smaller towns where life, space, and slowness are valued more.
New human
These mindset changes will set into motion a new lifestyle, a new focus for human beings globally– one with more emphasis on self, family, health, happiness, minimalism, rationalizing choices, work-life balance, and prioritizing ambitions. With emerging disciplines, the focus on learning & creativity will become paramount for all kids and young adults more-so. Multiple careers might start appearing to be a norm due to volatility in economies.
New company
Enterprises will be forced to become agile, tech-first, and transformation friendly. Volatile demands, changing need states of consumers, edits in the preamble written scores of years ago.
Digital fatigue reduction will be a goal in people’s lives & performance goals. Switching between work and home will become frequent. There will be higher churn in top jobs with deviation from the cookie-cutter profiles to more dynamic professionals who can be game-changers.
Arbitrage of travel over family life will reduce. The focus will shift on moving knowledge work globally to wherever talent is – and not restricted to an office location. This will give an unprecedented opportunity for individuals to fulfill their ambitions and give companies the right talent at the right price.
Future of work
Change management, growth mindsets, OKRs will become a daily norm. The new CEO bullpen/cockpit will become digital – personality-driven working sessions with collaboration tools to target and achieve strategic objectives. Technology will become intrinsic in every-day decision-making.
Personas will change – Sales teams not meeting people, marketing teams working on digital copies only, strategy teams whiteboarding digitally and never meeting, product portfolio teams rationalizing products and offerings to an omnichannel world cutting a number of products from 100s to 10s, changing focus from big brand to a consumer, prioritizing jobs to be done to only the impact creating ones.
The autoML, no code, and low code platforms will become mainstream, over hordes of people writing codes for projects. Anyone with an aptitude to learn will be able to do so at low cost, without spending their life’s savings on an IVY league or a set of hardware and software; instead, take a customized set of courses online at a much lower cost and pace. Guess the highly recommended networking will transform into a socially distant network. A much more respectful, introvert-friendly, solitude-supportive work method will emerge.
Conclusion
With all these 2021 predictions, it will hopefully make the world a much more sane, natural, peaceful place to live and flourish for all.
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