COVID and the Speed of Business Today

Lately I’ve been thinking about my first car phone. It was around 1987, and I’d just gotten one of these new gadgets—a clunker about the size and shape of Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone. Suddenly my commute home wasn’t just 40 minutes crawling in traffic on the Long Island Expressway, it was 40 minutes of productive work time that I didn’t have to spend the next day. I was thrilled.

I feel the same way about the transformation that’s happening in business today. The changes forced on us by Covid have propelled some companies, especially e-commerce businesses like mine, into a whole new world of speed. In every area of the business, from finance to operations to creative, we are moving at a pace we’ve never seen before.

As we head into the fall—and, hopefully, a safer world—a lot of companies are beginning to call employees back to the office. That’s what I thought we’d do at Saatva too, at least on a hybrid model. But the more I looked at what we’ve been able to accomplish during the past year of working remotely, the more I realized that letting people stay at home was the best long-term move for the business. Here’s why.

Our culture is strong.

As a digital-first company, we already had the infrastructure in place to successfully pivot to remote work. We also had a large enough core of company veterans to keep things moving smoothly even though we weren’t physically together. New people joining the company get plenty of help and guidance learning the “Saatva way.”  That would not have been possible without a strong company culture.

We can hire the best talent.

Before the pandemic, all of our employees worked in our locations in New York or Austin, Texas. Once the pandemic forced us out of our offices, we learned how to collaborate and be creative no matter where people sat. That meant I could hire the best person for the job, anywhere in the country or even the world. And hire we did: in the past 16 months, we’ve added 152 people across 18 states.

It’s never been easier to get people together.

One of the biggest challenges to efficient decision-making in any organization is logistics. Sometimes just getting the right people in the room is the hardest part. With the advent of Zoom and other forms of videoconferencing, a lot of those scheduling challenges disappear. As a result, we are meeting more often, in larger groups, and making decisions faster and more nimbly than we ever have.

Meetings are more productive.

Video calls force a certain discipline, so when we do get together there’s less wasted time. That doesn’t mean we don’t have fun, but we get down to business pretty quickly. People also come to video meetings more prepared. As a result, everyone learns something, there’s a more productive exchange of ideas, and that leads to more wins for the business.

Employees are happier.

I wouldn’t be doing this if employees were clamoring to come back to the office. But I know that not having to commute and having more personal or family time makes for a happier and more productive workforce. I’ve got the results to prove it: revenue has more than doubled in the past year, we’ve launched 18 new products, developed dozens more, and we’re about to open retail locations in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, and Austin. Our business is stronger than it has ever been. I’m not just letting people stay remote because I’m a nice guy.

I know that full-time remote work has its challenges. During the shutdown, we remodeled our offices to be beautiful, Covid-safe environments, and we want people to use them, whether it’s to meet with their colleagues or to have a quiet place to work or just to get out of the house. Blurring the lines between work and home, spending hours on Zoom calls, being hyper-productive—all of that can lead to burnout. Our leadership is focusing on that too. I want people to turn off when they are supposed to turn off. In fact, we are in the process of implementing a program that requires people to limit Zoom calls—or not have them at all—on certain days of the month.

Running an e-commerce business today is like driving 80 miles an hour on the highway; when everyone around you is also moving so quickly, you don’t realize how fast you’re going. Years from now, academics will write about this time and the accelerating impact Covid had on business. At Saatva, I’m proud that we were a pioneer of the digital commerce revolution, we are leading in the retail transformation, and now I believe we are in the forefront of a whole new way of working.

This article has been reposted on LinkedIn.