ReOrganizing The WorkPlace

In less than 2 months it will be 2022, nearly two years since the American Lifestyle was disrupted due to a mysterious virus we call Covid-19.

The pandemic and our response to it created a acceleration of certain changes that were happening but at a slower pace.  For example working from home created a boom for video conferencing and tele-meetings. Did you realize that Zoom was founded over a decade ago? It was one of those software companies that was just chugging along, took over 6 years to become profitable, and then it seemed like everyone discovered it in 2020 out of necessity.

I had been using it for a couple of years before that with a friend and client of mine for our weekly meetings with her team that were all across the country.

On-line shopping was something we had been doing with national companies like Amazon, E-bay and Zappos to name a few, but out of necessity, in 2020 if you were a small mom and pop or a local chain, you needed to create a way to sell your stuff besides coming into your brick and mortar store.

My wife and I did most of our grocery shopping online and still do some of it especially as the weather gets uglier.

That’s some of the consumer side, how about the business side of life?

It was announced that McDonald’s is going to take a Chicago experiment and make it a national innovation.  McDonald’s is partnering with IBM to automate the drive-thru experience.  We’ve already seen many fast food joints install kiosks to place and pay for your order when you go inside, and the popularity of mobile apps has surged in the past couple of years too.

This move of McDonald’s to eliminate the humans from the customer drive-thru experience is expected to actually create a better customer experience and help ease the worker shortages.

That’s the other side of this coin, a lack of people willing and able to fill the jobs has created the necessity for companies to find alternatives to the way things have always been done in the past.  I wonder what innovations are going on in your business or industry?  Drop me a line or comment and tell me.

The company I work for is making some adjustments. Federated Media is a privately owned company with a dozen radio stations in Northern Indiana along with a digital division.  I worked for one of our Fort Wayne Indiana radio stations on the air in my 20’s and then came back 30 years later to join the Local Advertising Sales Team for WOWO radio.  In 2020, I took over as the General Sales Manager of WOWO.

Before I returned to Federated Media, they did some restructuring of their Fort Wayne radio division which created some efficiencies in their operations and also set us up for success for the 2020 pandemic a dozen years later.  One of those changes was the elimination of an office or assigned workspace for the local advertising sales people.  We were doing work from home long before it was the thing to do in 2020.  When people asked me about my job, I would tell them about the flexibility of my work schedule and say, “I only go to the office 2 hours a week”.  One hour for our weekly sales team meetings and the other hour was for a one-on one meeting with my boss.

When I moved into management, I did have an office, but for about 3 months in the spring of 2020, I was also working from my home office again.

Sometime in the next few weeks, Federated Media is going to begin moving into a new larger office space that we recently purchased.  The past 3 years, Federated Media Fort Wayne has been operating from two buildings and this new place will bring us back together under one roof.  However, I noticed in the planning for the new floor plan, we are not creating offices or cubicles for the local sales people because we simple don’t need them.  Currently there are 15, and in the year ahead we will expand to 20 local advertising sales people in Fort Wayne, and they will continue to have the same freedom to come to the office for about two hours a week most weeks.

By the way, I am hiring for a couple of qualified people to join my team.  Email Scott@WOWO.com for details.

What about your workplace?  What kind of reorganization are you doing?