Just when the reopening was proceeding in a fashion that elevated expectations about a return to normal life, the Delta variant upended everyone’s summer.
A long 18 months just got longer. And the longer this strange temporary world remains our reality, the less transitory it is likely to be.
Contributor Steve Gresham addresses many of these issues in his column on page 28. Even before any of us ever heard the term “Covid-19,” work-life balance was emerging as a critical issue for both employees and employers.
As Gresham notes, the issue of where to work—at the office or at home—is the overriding question for the moment. It’s not new.
People were talking about flextime two decades ago. Back then, the conversation often revolved around working from home if you had a doctor’s appointment or some other task in the middle of the day and it was more convenient. Now that conversation has expanded into one about full-time work.
There are two ways advisors and financial services companies can address this challenge. One alternative favored by Gresham is to focus on things they can control, while treating the work location issue as yet another catalyst to confront all the ongoing changes already roiling the workplace.
The other option is to set occupancy targets and hope they can be met. Hope, as someone once remarked, is not a strategy. Over the long term, the employees who rise to the top are likely to be the ones who embrace change, and that will include returning to the office often.
Change, as you no doubt noticed, is also brewing in Washington, D.C. This month’s cover story on page 42 by Washington editor Tracey Longo takes a look at the new regulatory regime in the Biden administration.
Gary Gensler, the new SEC chairman, shows every sign of becoming a lot more than another placeholder. Like a handful of past SEC chairs, such as Joseph Kennedy and Arthur Levitt, Gensler once worked in the trenches on Wall Street, not in a law firm. Consequently, he knows almost every trick in the book.
Gensler is also a keen student of fintech and blockchain. He taught a class on the latter at M.I.T.