The year 2020 will always be remembered as the year of COVID. A year in which life—personal and professional—was interrupted by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Our work lives and home lives collided like never before.

If 2020 was marked by a frantic reordering and adjustment on both the home and work fronts, I’m optimistic we’re all entering 2021 breathing a bit easier, having settled into our “new (ab)normal” routines.

While initially SARS-CoV-2 has been the mother of all disruptors, the fact is, once herd immunity is reached and we can say the population is “healthy,” many COVID-driven trends are likely here to stay forever.

The most obvious is the use of technology for communication, which has allowed many of us to work from home during the pandemic. Once we enter a post-COVID world, will company owners want to continue paying rent for office space when, let’s face it, the same work is getting done remotely, and often more efficiently?

Apollo Technical released some interesting statistics in an article posted to their site, exploring the positive and negative aspects of remote working (https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivity-statistics).

Several studies over the past few months show productivity while working remotely from home is better than working in an office setting. On average, those who work from home spend 10 minutes less a day being unproductive, work one more day a week, and are 47% more productive. However, on the flip side, the hardest part of working from home the article said, referencing the New York Times, is the loneliness and lack of social interaction.

The pandemic has also ushered in virtual site visits and audits—both from clients and regulatory bodies—saving of course time and money. As the technology platforms in this space continue to evolve and become more sophisticated, it’s hard to imagine a world this doesn’t become the dominant mode of conduct. Same for remote clinical trials.

Same also goes for the hiring process. Our resident Managing Your Career columnist, Dave Jensen, gets into this here. He says there’s a completely different interview process in place right now and no one knows how long it will last. However, he says long term changes are almost certainly here for good. “While companies will work as quickly as they can to safely bring back face-to-face interviews, the Zoom or video interview is here to stay. Where in the past you may have flown four or five candidates in to visit on-site, perhaps in the future we’ll Zoom interview 90% of them, and then only bring forward the finalist to a face-to-face.”

In this month’s COVID-19 Impact Report, the chief executive of Syngene, Jonathan Hunt, said another major learning from the pandemic is that “timelines in discovery, development and manufacturing, which were long held to be sacrosanct are not written in stone after all.” He argues that the pharma industry will no longer consider ten to twelve years as an acceptable timeline to bring a drug to the market now that we’ve seen it can be done in a much shorter timeframe.

Click here where you’ll hear from many other leaders we called upon across the contract pharma industry to discuss the impact of the coronavirus in 2020 and also what we can expect from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021.

Tim Wright, Editor
twright@rodmanmedia.com