For the past five months, work-from-home (WFH) has been one of the most important topics of almost every modern business in the world—and for good reason. With the events of 2020 still in full swing globally, businesses have been forced to make some big changes to their business processes, IT environments, and how they manage their teams and customers respectively. 

The media and entertainment industry is no exception. As of March this year, post-production environments were moved from the comfort of studios around the world and supplanted by kitchen tables, small home offices and, dare I say it, even the occasional ironing board—all in the hopes of keeping businesses forging ahead.

Now, as the initial dust has settled and organizations now look to fine tune and improve their remote capabilities, there are three major factors that must be addressed to continue down the road to success. 

The first is probably the most obvious, technology. For the entirety of the media and entrainment world, enabling remote editing has not always been easy. From addressing connectivity to workflow and collaboration, to storage—the struggle has been very real. So much so that our company pivoted its entire development team to create a remote access solution called RAP (Remote Access Portal) to solve those aforementioned problems, and more. You can read about that here: RAP (Remote Access Portal)

But all shameless product plugs aside, media organizations around the world are adopting new and exciting technology that will forever change the face of the industry, allowing for anywhere, anytime editing in the same manner as if the editors were in-house (in the office).

As for the second factor, this new work-from-anywhere infrastructure is about to impact the traditional workplace in ways never thought possible. Of course, business continuity practices fall within this new paradigm, but there is so much more. How long will the traditional office space persist? If even post-production can be moved to anywhere, all while enabling the same experience as in-house / in-office once did, then why will we even need spaces going forward?

And though many will argue that in-person collaboration, etc., is still best, no one even 20 years ago would have thought that an entire generation would find love through a mobile app—people evolve, habits change, and the world adapts quickly no matter how us old folks complain. Oh, and if I’m not mistaken, people’s grandparents were able to adapt to Zoom calls within weeks of 2020. So, cheers to evolution. 😉

And finally, an entirely different idea of the workforce has resulted from the combination of the first two major changes. For one, talent is now a global pool. The days of having to find amazing post-production people in one’s home town no longer applies. Instead, talent can be half-way around the world, speak multiple languages, and draw from cultural and geographical insights to make organizations that much better.

Pair that with the concept of managing through office face-time, and replacing that with measuring actual performance and productivity, and suddenly the world changes once again for the better.

In all, 2020 for all its downsides has also brought out the best in people. We have banded together to solve a multitude of challenges, overcome adversity, and in the middle of all that perhaps changed industry as we know it.