GadgetFreak

September 11 was a discrete event, not something that something that lasted months. The technology was far less refined then for video conferencing and work from home. As a comparison, my wife, who works in IT, worked in WTC1. I think she was back to work at an alternate site within 2 days of September 11. She has been working from home since March now. In addition to safety, companies have figured out how much they can save by reducing their office space footprint. The post about Pinterest upthread shows that. Some big employers, I seem to recall Google for instance, are shifting a lot of people to work from home.

It isn’t just the pandemic. It’s the pandemic happening at the same time the virtual meeting technology is really maturing that is driving this. And I think it is a very fundamental change in the way a lot of people work.

stimpy

Not true at all. Have you forgotten the Shoe Bomber and all the other terrorism scares? And the likes of CNN blasting out terror, terror, terror? It was not a discrete event but something that lasted for several years.

That is only true for video and document collaboration. For many of us our WFH is audio and email mainly. No different from 2001. Some companies are more into video and collaboration, but not all.

ExplorerWannabe

Some travel and meeting in person will assuredly return but a lot of the discussion about "competitive advantage" sounds like wishful thinking to me (not all but a lot). The personal touch sometimes helps close a deal but straightforward numbers do as well.

I do a lot with Microsoft Teams and other collaboration software since WFH started and sometimes there is no substitute for getting into a big room with a lot of whiteboards. In some areas, we've gotten far more efficient and effective because the pandemic forced us to think differently and we found collaboration tools worked for us. In other areas, it has caused weeks of delay or flat-out inability to do the job as desired.

I suspect a lot of the business travel in the future will be more heavily scrutinized than it was pre-pandemic. Not surprisingly, those who do the scrutinizing will be more likely to deem their own travel as "necessary". Conferences and symposia that were really just tourism on the company's dime will likely diminish severely (some people will always be able to make it sound like their trips will save the world). Ultimately, I expect this event will be as transformative as 9/11 was albeit in different ways.

With winter colds and flu complicating the picture, I expect some biz travel may start resuming in spring 2021 but conferences and such probably won't resume until companies can see the lay of the land so not until late summer 2021 IMO.

MileageAddict

I'm your opposite. I've started working from home about 2 years before the 'rona hit. I went into the office (40 miles away) maybe once a quarter. I haven't been to my office now since early December 2019. I imagine it has a nice layer of dust covering everything. Don't care - I love working from home.

sdsearch

Define your meaning of "resume" more precisely please?

It's one thing to resume a little bit, it's another thing (possibly never?) to resume back to pre-Covid levels. (And there's a zillion levels of resumption between those two.)

The moment just a few business fliers start flying for business again, the first condition has been met (resume a little bit).

OTOH, given the success of meetings with Zoom, etc, it's likely that online meetings will replace at least part of business travel "forever". So it may require overall population and travel growth to bring business travel back to pre-Covid levels, not just the economy coming back, because even when the economy comes back, some businesses will find that online meetings work just as well (with less time lost on the travel itself) than in-person meetings. Not for all situations, but for enough of them to noticeably reduce the amount of business travel compare to pre-Covid and thus (for many businesses) pre-Zoom/etc.

invisible

[Mod edit]

The fact in one technology company with >100k employees is that Teams/Slack/Zoom works. For 99% of cases and management says that when things go back to resembling ‘pre-corona normal’, things will stay as is.

Dublin_rfk

Like doctors and medical suppliers. If you believe that medical conferences in PR won’t come back I have some land just west of Miami up for sale.