Iliyana's Blog

Digitisation - The New Normal Post COVID-19

[fa icon="calendar"] 12-Nov-2020 14:00:04 / by Sam Hirbod

home office post covidThis is a guest post by my friend and former colleague Sam Hirbod. 

This year, INBOUND 2020 - HubSpot's yearly inbound conference - moved to an all-digital immersive format featuring exceptional speakers ranging from Sandy Carter, VP of Amazon Web Services to Chrissy Teigen, Bestselling Author.

The move to digital events is not something HubSpot is alone in doing, it’s been an ongoing trend for the past years but 2020 definitely accelerated the process of having industries digitising their efforts.

When applicable, digitalisation removes the physical barriers of COVID-19, making it easy for people to still meet, albeit online. As a result, people were able to attend INBOUND 2020 from all over the world from the comfort of their own homes or offices.

What’s the downside of digitalisation? From my perspective, although biased as I work within the tech industry, there aren’t too many as it’s all about putting customers first and making sure everything still works the way they want it to.

With that said, one noticeable trend that comes with the freedom of working from wherever you are is to make sure you make time for what’s essential. For example, if you’re attending an online event from home, that means that you can still have your inbox opened up in the background, receive Slack notifications and take phone calls in the middle of a session. This only covers what’s going on in front of your screen, in the background you could have a dog wanting to go for a walk or kids needing help with homework.

Managing these events and circumstances are what makes or breaks a productive day.

Something that HubSpot has done is to make sure we all feel seen, heard and valued, whether we are customers or employees. For example, if a customer, we’ve adapted and continually adjusted how we service them in these turbulent times. If an employee, one gets a work from home bonus so one can purchase standing desks, an extra monitor or whatever else helps our working environment.

These changes may seem self-explanatory for those who are already adjusting towards the new-normal, but for those who still haven’t moved; now would be the time.

Now is the time to think about how we can make sure everyone, customers or employees, can feel seen, heard and valued and the consequences of not changing anything at all.

Adjusting to the new-normal is not only the trend of INBOUND 2020, it’s the trend of 2020.

In these months, industries that once prospered prior to March tanked within a few months or shut down on a global level. These are dire times and actions need to be taken.

Many companies who survived the storm had refocused their offline efforts online to continue driving value to their customers. They made changes. They adjusted.

As months have passed since the start of COVID-19, the new-normal is part of our lives now, but we still haven’t fully adjusted.

So I leave you with this, how will you continue to adjust as an individual and as a company if ever another similar event arises and a newer-normal occurs?

 

Topics: Brands and Business, Technology

Sam Hirbod

Written by Sam Hirbod

Sam Hirbod is a Certified Professional Coach and expert in the fields of inbound marketing, business consulting, and account management. He is an Inbound Marketing and Business Strategy coach and is responsible for helping HubSpot's largest Agencies grow better by translating business cases into sustainable action plans. Before HubSpot he was Head of Marketing & Analytics and selected as a Google trainer, on topics including digitization, future of content and delivering success to clients to name a few.

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