New norm or return to old?
Not long after COVID-19 started to force change into our lives, I realised a few important things:
- We can look after our customers, even if we're all working from home (we hired the right people)
- It's not quite the same, but for the most part, we can maintain our team culture (we hired good people)
- Like most, we had a bumpy start, but we are still very productive. Possibly more than ever (we actually hired awesome people)
Additionally, and without dismissing the dreadful cost to our economy and health, we can't ignore the positive impact that COVID-19 has had on family relationships and the environment.
We all grew up accepting that we have to leave our families behind every day to "go and make a living". Thanks to COVID-19, we now know we can do better than survive - we can actually thrive when integrating work and life as opposed to separating them as we always have.
I'm not saying that we should remain cooped up, and I appreciate that not every person or business has a choice. Not at all. But I do believe this situation has drawn attention to how our usual conventions can be challenged for the better. Our climate, our families, and our society can benefit from change and we've proven to ourselves that we can still (out)perform.
It's incredibly difficult for societies to change the way they operate. Even when we know what's good for us, taking the first step is hard. It takes courage in government to inspire these things, but that's not going to happen for us. This pandemic has inadvertently forced the first few steps out of us though, so shouldn't we consider what a new norm might look like?
Although I'm a practical guy, I admit I can be a little Utopian at times. However, the team at Digital Experience Labs made a collective and conscious decision yesterday to change our norm for the benefit of our health, our families, and our planet. We don't have all the answers, but we've observed, we've learned and will continue to do so. We're not flexing back to old patterns just yet. Perhaps even never again.
So, I'm curious - are you in a rush to go back to how we were, or has your norm changed too?
СBDO | Quema | Building scalable and secure IT infrastructures and allocating dedicated IT engineers from our team
1yLuis, thanks for sharing!
Luis, it's a fresh opportunity to change. Time to embrace a new world and we can be brave about it, as your people showed. The world would be better as a hybrid. You have already started that change.
Driving Engagement and Impact | Public Relations | Social Media | CSR | Sponsorships | Leadership
4yGreat piece Luis
I have been working remotely for extended periods of time when I was in Singapore and Manila. So personally, this is nothing new for me. I do work more hours at home than when coming to office. I guess the only downside will be those times when we truly need to have face to face interaction with the team or client, to build deeper relationships and better understand of their needs. Although, nowadays video calls can be used to do this, it still will not replace the depth you get from meeting face to face. As a parent, I understand that homeschooling has been around for decades. For families like mine, it was initially very challenging. But In many sense, this covid-19 allowed me to know my children deeper. It gave me a different perspective about them. It also allowed me to collaborate more with the teachers. I am very lucky though to have children who are home-buddies. In every undesirable situation, we all need to find the good from it. I always say “difficult” is not the correct word to use. “Challenging” should be used instead, because it makes us want to give our best to complete what is at hand. The situation during and after Covid-19 is and will be challenging.
Organisational Psychologist, Change and Transformation Leader -bringing unique perspective to organizational change and people solutions.
4yGreat Share Luis Nejo. Agree that it all goes back to having the right /awesome people in place. I recently participated on some focus group that asked the same questions from staff as we ponder to go back safely to office. Some themes: With a clear majority people enjoyed the opportunity to work from home and the flexibility that it offers. And many indicated they were more productive( once they overcame the tech issues with eg Zoom etc) Culturally, there is a shift to greater trust and empowerment. The stigma associated with flexible working has gone. Thus 'we have proved that we can be trusted to work from home' With activity based working places / hot desking recently labelled in the Fin Review as the new 'Cruise ships of Covid' I cant see there is going back to how things were.