[Suits and Business Cards Are Outdated] The New Normal of Business Manners [The With-COVID Era]

This time I'll explain the new business manners that have emerged after COVID.

By reading this article, you can pick up a way of working that fits the with-COVID era.

Three business new normals as I define them

The acceleration of telework due to COVID has created a new normal for business, and I define that new normal as follows:

Let me explain each one.

Don't wear a suit

I think the situations in life where you truly need to wear a suit are about 1%.

The reason is the overwhelmingly poor cost-performance.

Wearing a suit doesn't make your body any more comfortable, and it needs regular dry cleaning, which costs time, money, and effort.

Also, telework right now is a state of forced work from home, but it could just as well be from a travel destination or anywhere, and yet it feels odd to drag along the habit of wearing a suit for work.

A suit, so to speak, plays the role of creating a good impression in business.

But if a good impression is the goal, rather than wearing a suit you should study how you look and sound in online meetings.

Don't make phone calls

The phone is a tool that doesn't fit today's era and forcibly takes away the other person's time.

The efficiency and necessity of the phone have long been questioned in this age of countless digital tools.

Also, making a phone call assumes you are contacting someone who is in the office, so it is a poor match for telework.

You could make full use of mobile phones, but a mobile phone is a personal item and hard to call smart from an employee's point of view.

Moreover, "mobile phone" now means smartphone, so in that case you should use a modern, easy-to-use means such as Zoom rather than the legacy phone.

Also, phone exchanges require the work of writing up a record of what was discussed, so they can be wasteful compared with text-based online tools.

Don't hold meetings

In the office, it was not unusual for meetings to happen frequently precisely because the environment made it easy to just start talking to someone.

Meetings are not originally productive activity, but holding many meetings also had the harmful effect of making you feel like you had worked.

To grow a company or business, what really matters is focusing on productive activity (generating ideas, marketing, business strategy, writing), and you need ingenuity and effort to bring meetings, which tend to multiply, down to nearly zero.

Some people think of "meetings" as synonymous with work, but that is a big mistake.

By using asynchronous online communication tools such as Slack and Chatwork in the gaps between productive activity, you can maintain high productivity without needing meetings.

If you're unsure about running telework, use outside support

If you're unsure about running telework, organizations and companies such as the Telework Promotion Center can support you.

My company (ACIDHOUSE, INC.) also offers services to support the introduction of telework, so if you're interested, please get in touch.