Who would have thought this time last year that the world would change as much as it has done in 2020? 2019 seems so incredibly long ago!
In the year when we were forced to embrace staying in as the new going out, there are so many things that have changed – some for the better, and some not so much!
We pick out some of the highlights in this blog, looking at both the changes in what many of us experienced personally and those we embraced from a business perspective:
Cooking has become the new commute
Remember the days when you used to commute into work?! That time would often be used to decompress the day, wind down before returning home and provide a buffer between work and home life. According to a recent survey by Waitrose many of us have begun to use cooking in the same way – the time it takes to cook a meal has become the wind down time in the absence of the commute. It means 2020 has seen many of us eating more home cooked meals than ever before.
Work / life balance
This follows on from the previous point – gaining those hours we’d normally lose on a commute meant an improved work / life balance for many people (although we completely understand this doesn’t apply to everyone). Being able to work from home has enabled us to spend more quality time with the family, eating dinners round the table together and even heading outdoors to exercise. Many businesses that may previously have resisted calls from employees to work from home have now seen that productivity hasn’t suffered, and that employees can be trusted to get the work done when they’re not in the office. It may indeed lead to a more permanent rise in remote working beyond 2020.
The rise of the ghost cities
Also related to the point about commuting, we now unfortunately see the demise of the city centre. Let’s focus for a minute on London… Back in 2019, London was thriving, arguably the epicentre of commerce in Europe. The London we see today is very different. The crowds commuting into town have gone, and many of those smaller businesses such as coffee shops that rely on commuter trade are disappearing too. Our hope is that we will start to see a rise in coffee shops and these kinds of businesses in our local areas, simply because our location has transferred to where we live, not where we travel to work.
The demise of workwear
And skinny jeans! As many of us reported eating and drinking more, especially during the first lockdown, so we ditched the wearing of skinny jeans and embraced functional leisurewear instead. And what about the business suit? Many of them are gathering dust in the wardrobe!
When zoom became a noun
This time last year we’d never really heard of Zoom! It was a niche piece of business software mostly used by tech businesses. When the pandemic hit, it became the word we’d all used for being able to run online meetings, so much so that we started to refer to any online meeting as a zoom call – from interactions with colleagues to quizzes with friends and sharing birthday wishes with family members.
The disappearance of large gatherings
We’re specifically thinking of meetings and large conferences, but this equally applies to gatherings in our personal lives. Here at FSTL, if there were any meetings taking place for clients we could no longer attend them. So we found ourselves giving our clients advice on how to get the best possible quality recording using phones or zoom, so they could send them to us for transcription.
Looking back, 2020 has been a year of getting on with it. Having to accept what is beyond our control, adapt to whatever is thrown at us and perhaps becoming more grateful and appreciative of what we might have taken for granted in the past.
Here’s to carrying those positive points through into 2021.
We’d just like to take a moment to say a big thank you to all our clients for continuing to use us for their transcription needs!
And also to our wonderful team, who have stuck with us and have jumped to it whenever we’ve asked, sometimes at very short notice & at all hours. We simply couldn’t provide the service we do without them!
Merry Christmas and a happy new year to you all.