Covid, Technology & Cape May County’s Future

This Covid-19 pandemic has wrought unimaginable destruction globally; to state that is to state the obvious. It will be exhaustively documented in the history books, and will be talked of by our grandchildren for decades to come. Colossal events, whether cataclysmic or beneficent, work lasting changes upon the human story. What such changes will the Covid’s visitation create in Cape May County?
As I read a May 18 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article on how the virus is changing the tech giants, I saw its fingerprints all over Cape May County.  To make a point, the article wrote of a tech company, Box, whose employees have been operating outside of their offices for two months, and in the process found out just how smoothly the operation continued to run, even achieving some successes which they would not have had if they had been in their offices. They were able to make more sales calls and gained time which they did not have to spend commuting.
This is no fringe phenomenon. Twitter has been so favorably impressed by the way things are going for them that they have decided that most employees will be permitted to work from home permanently. Google and Facebook have allowed their employees to do so through at least the end of the year.
There are other factors, beyond saving commuting time, driving this thinking. Operating a company in a big city is expensive in terms of office space and the price of housing for the staff. They cite as an example one employee who took a 25% cut in pay for permission to live way off in a small city.
I am a member of the government affairs committee of the New Jersey Press Association which meets monthly. Several years ago we publishers would meet in person, but then we turned to conference calls. This month, for the first time, we met via Zoom. To this point, I have missed seeing the people, but the addition of the video was a major enhancement. At our last meeting, prior to getting down to business, we were chatting about working from home, and whether we might ever make that a permanent arrangement. We discussed the likelihood that some face-to-face contact would always be desirable; thus a “tweener” structure might be most appropriate, where people work from home part of the time.
The WSJ article touched on the topic of business culture: “Maintaining the level of communication and camaraderie that enables communication and development will be a challenge if a significant number of staff remain remote.”
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Back to the question: How does this phenomenon impact Cape May County? Since the advent of the internet, the people of our county have been asking similar questions. Given the ongoing threat of this virus and  future viruses, and given the ability of improving technology to enable people to live anywhere, ever more people  will choose to live, not just outside of the city, but in more desirable areas, including here, facing the vast,  shimmering ocean.
Cape May County is close to large cities, which enables face-to-face meetings when desired. Yet, our county is rural and remote, offering an enhanced quality of life, lower living costs and greater safety.  We will never be a manufacturing center, but we are ideally suited for a white-collar population. What does the future hold for our picturesque county? Only God knows. But technological advancements have brought upheavals to the developed world in these last couple of centuries. The Information-Age technologies, augmented by the internet, are certain to continue the upheaval here on our stunning peninsula.  Hold on to your hats.