Extended Recovery

Here’s one for your next team meeting: Ask what long term effects COVID continues to have on how your organization functions.

There are some fairly obvious things. More people working from home or hybrid, we’re all pretty familiar with Zoom, you probably still have hand sanitizer easily accessible in your workspaces.

But what about the deeper, less apparent effects?

In a conversation with some leaders this week we wrestled with the ongoing impact of three years of disruption.

-Like them, you may have a bunch of staff who arrived after March 2020 who have no reference point for how things worked before. That could be a tension with more experienced team members who are trying to have everything go back to the way it was.

-The command and control necessities of sudden changes to protocols have made it difficult for some people to work in less authority based ways; and made others very resistant to those patterns.

-A fundamental distrust of authority across society has made managing people more complicated and senior leadership seem suspect.

-Shrinking our worlds relationally while having more access to news from around the world affects the ways people give, or don’t, to both local and global needs.

-People who had grown used to working from home are struggling with both the need for return to office and, in many cases, less adept at the informal human interactions that contribute to team culture.

-Fewer people working onsite has some organizations dealing with rent costs they would love to reduce, but a real estate market that is hard to navigate as landlords are in their own recovery.

I’m sure you can add your own observations.

As a leadership consultant, not a doctor or epidemiologist, I’m more intrigued by the cultural effects remaining from the pandemic than the medical ones. In both cases, it will take a generation or two to begin to really understand all the ways these turbulent years continue to shape our lives.

It’s worth asking your team what they see and what can or should be done to address it.