How soon will workplaces return to normal? In many cases, will there be a new normal?

Not surprisingly, the answers will vary sector-to-sector and business-to-business.

Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins said the following: “I think you’ll see many employees that will continue to work from home, you’ll have many that will get back to the office and then you’ll have some that’ll do a little bit of both.”

Companies that navigate this successfully will have a huge advantage over companies who don’t adapt, and this can lead to greater productivity and also reduce overhead costs such as expensive office space in the future.

A working paper from two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco illustrates how the Coronavirus pandemic may accelerate the trend towards automation of some workplaces:

“Workers can be exposed to health risks, and social distancing measures can reduce labor productivity by hindering the ability to work. But robots do not get sick,” Leduc and Liu wrote in the paper, posted on the San Francisco Fed’s website on May 8. “If a production process can be automated, a firm can use a robot instead of a worker to perform some risky tasks. In this sense, automation provides a hedge against job uncertainty stemming from the pandemic.”

Of course this trend has been going on for years, particularly in manufacturing. And in some cases, we’ve seen that automation sometimes creates new problems. It’s not always a silver bullet, but the chaos caused by this pandemic will certainly lead to more companies investigating ways to replace humans with machines in the workplace.

With the Coronavirus crisis, the once-robust job market has been destroyed as we embrace social distancing to bend the curve and do our best to reduce deaths. But the economic ramifications are devastating. So many businesses are struggling. Some may have to close down permanently, while millions of workers are losing their jobs. Think about workers in restaurants, hotels, cruise ships, entertainment venues, etc.

Meanwhile, certain businesses like grocery stores, online businesses, etc. are thriving as most people are isolating at home.

The result is a huge spike in workers needed for certain business. Here’s a very handy list of companies that are hiring now.