Hindsight 2020: Addressing Social Change in Business

In a time not long ago, families would wake up and enjoy breakfast together. You would drop your children off at school. You would continue with your day while feeling the wind on your skin and the sun in your eyes. You would run family errands by stopping by a few stores. You may even get a call that your child is sick. You would stop everything, pick up your child, and go into the doctor. This could be viewed as a “normal” routine. 

Welcome to 2020 and the new “normal”! Each of these experiences has changed for multiple reasons. The most prominent cause for these changes is the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to promote health and remain safe, new modes of conducting business had to be established. As a business owner, you have to be able to respond to social change in order to maintain a successful business. The smallest common tasks that were once taken for granted have taken on an entirely new look and function this year. 

Big and small businesses have had to re-evaluate their customer service. Large restaurant chains like Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and the like had to revisit home delivery options. These are restaurants that would have been viewed as American casual dining. The mission of these restaurants is to have customers come in and eat. In order to maintain customers during the quarantine time, they had to become flexible by providing food delivery like a common pizza shop. 

The reality is that if the larger chains had to make such a drastic change, then so would the small mom and pop shops. Small businesses that did not make such changes lost significant revenue and suffered economically.

Education was undeniably changed. From Pre-K-12 to post-secondary education, students could no longer enter brick and mortar school buildings. Schools and education companies were forced to begin creating more innovative collaborative applications and learning management systems to keep students engaged. 

Some of these applications that were used in education began being used by other small businesses and the medical community. Applications, like Zoom and Google Meet, are used to teach online courses, hold virtual meetings, and conduct virtual doctor’s appointments. 

Needless to say, change is inevitable. These innovations were always in place, but forced business owners to rise to the challenge of actually using them more effectively to increase productivity. In order to conduct face-to-face business, customers would need to wear face masks for health concerns. Businesses, in order to return to working in buildings, would need to implement COVID-19 cleaning. Cleaning would need to take place on a more frequent basis. This just shows that everyone in every facet of business had to change. 

These social changes forced companies like Red Lobster to offer delivery to maintain their business. Red Lobster did not hire drivers. They coupled with companies like DoorDash to handle that portion of the need created by the pandemic. Schools, universities, and doctor’s offices allowed Zoom and Google Meet to help facilitate webinars, meetings, and breakout rooms for individualized sessions. They offered the needed support to the companies.

These social changes may have been viewed as a hassle initially because there was the need to get trained to use the technical innovations. This can be daunting for small business owners who would like to just focus on their craft. This is where SBI Detroit comes in.

SBI Detroit is here to offer that needed support to your company with improving how to deal with your business’ infrastructure. SBI Detroit is here to deal with the technical innovations for you that would allow you to realistically compete with the larger companies. We are here to offer assistance with licensure, website design along with content and imaging support. 

Embracing change allows your business to grow exponentially.