Businesses ‘Muscle Through’ Lasting Pandemic Changes
By Paul Natinsky
Metro Detroit employers felt the ground shift beneath them during the height of the COVID pandemic in 2021-2022. Precautionary measures intended to limit the spread of COVID-19 had the devastating unintended effect of slowing to a trickle the revenue streams of “in-person” businesses such as restaurants, concert venues and banquet halls.
Simultaneously, office-based enterprises saw the birth of a new culture and attitude toward work. Characterized by the necessity to work at home—away from other people and the danger of infection—employees became accustomed to taking their meetings over video conferencing connections such as Zoom.
As we head toward the end of 2023, a largely vaccinated population has returned to work, to restaurants, to concerts and ball games. But in a very different way than many expected. Work and recreational culture have changed in ways that seem enduring if not irreversible.
We spoke to a wide sample of Detroit-area businesspeople in the summers of 2020 and 2021—during the height of the pandemic. This month, we checked back with some of these sources to find out how their businesses are faring post-pandemic and to assess the changes COVID left behind.
“The hangover is still there,” says Jason Najor, who owns several Detroit-area businesses including several Beyond Juice restaurants, a cell-phone repair and reconditioning business and a banquet hall. He says it is difficult to lure employees back to work in the post-COVID environment.
Najor attributes much of the reluctant return to work to the largesse provided by emergency COVID funding, which included generous and lengthy unemployment benefits. He says there is still a small amount of government money to be had, and that is fueling some of the worker shortage. But employment under pandemic conditions unearthed new ways of looking at work…and life.
The new normal is getting a better work-life balance, said Najor. There is no returning to what was normal before the pandemic. The flexibility of working from the house a couple of days a week is “way too hard to take back.”
“I think employees’ attitudes have shifted sharply with respect to work-life balance and home-work balance in terms of where they are physically,” said Mike Sarafa, who owns an equity stake in 345 Supercuts value hair salons.
Sarafa operates a small office to manage his business interests, and that workplace is seeing the same cultural changes experienced in traditional offices elsewhere. Workers in office settings have become accustomed to working from home in casual attire, with no commute and the flexibility of picking their kids up from school. The slowing of the pandemic has not quelled the desire for this new, balanced way of working.
Ziyad Hermiz is a litigator at Varnum LLP. He says minor legal proceedings are made easier by retaining video conferencing adopted during the pandemic, and many are still conducted remotely. But, he says, many hearings and trials are moving away from the virtual courtroom back into the actual one.
Hermiz says it makes sense to avoid taking the time to drive to minor proceedings, which can waste half a day. But he prefers conducting depositions and trials live. As a litigator, he is accustomed to live exchanges.
Outside of office settings, employers face different challenges. Supercuts employs a large on-premise workforce, stylists have to be at the stores to do their job. But the shift to a more balanced work-life culture has not left them behind.
Supercuts stores do a huge portion of their weekly business on weekends, and another chunk during evening hours. Sarafa says that while the very tight restrictions in force during the height of COVID are largely gone, his stores have difficulty getting enough employees to staff Sundays or work past 5 p.m. during the week.
In addition to being short employees—Sarafa says he could fill 200 stylist positions immediately and Najor says his Beyond Juice businesses are often run by skeleton crews—they cost more. Inflation has settled down, bringing some relief, but wages that bulged during the pandemic have remained at escalated levels.
In this environment, businesses find it hard to expand. In addition to a shortage of workers, high labor costs and the lingering effects of an inflation surge, demand for some services has not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. Office-adjacent businesses such as lunch spots, convenience stores and gas stations are not used as frequently as they were when the bulk of the workforce went to the office.
The pandemic ushered in another enduring change. Interpersonal communication has deteriorated.
“Communication skills are almost gone. Politeness is almost gone. People have no patience,” said Najor. He said it took 100 years of development since the industrial revolution to build this economy. “It’s amazing how far that’s regressed in one or two years of shutdown.”
“We’re real old school family businesses. We come from the grocery industry, where customer service is number one. We come from the hospitality industry, where customer service is number one,” said Najor.
But, he said, growth in the current environment will cause the customer-focus his family brings to its businesses to fade. He says “you can’t be in two places at the same time,” and without a family member always on hand to direct training, the strong customer service ethos will become diluted.
The pandemic’s worst effects on business may be receding, but a host of unexpected consequences will challenge the Detroit area’s businesses for some time.
As Sarafa says: “It’s a battle, but we just try to muscle through it day in and day out.”