Realizing that people have had a very wide range of experiences over the past 3 years, and that our experiences have become increasingly siloed, I know that I can't speak to what this moment means for everyone. But I have some thoughts that might apply to people like me -- middle-aged and middle-class White folks who happen to be in leadership roles in organizations, who have weathered the pandemic with exposure to upsets and tragedies but no catastrophic damage, and who are potentially in a position to set directions for our post-pandemic future. I am part of the leadership teams of several groups -- grant teams, academic programs, a church -- and have been struck by some common themes at this moment of transition, which I offer here for comment and comparison to your own observations.
1. The world has changed since 2019. This might seem self-evident, but I'm starting with this point because leaders need to recognize that the "end of the emergency" does not mean "pre-pandemic status quo." Take a good look around your organization. If nothing else, you are likely to notice that many of the people are different. Those who are there have different expectations about their personal needs and how organizations might be expected to meet them. Shifts in public attitudes also necessitate changes in how organizations do business, although polarization means that the nature of those shifts can be highly varied. There are probably some new organizational processes put into place over the last 3 years, many of which were patched together reactively as conditions evolved. And there are almost certainly new places where people connect to your organization, in particular online. The lesson for leaders is to not expect a return to business as usual, even though on the surface some activities like travel and restaurant dining look much the same as in 2019. We have had to be adaptive and creative over the past 3 years; those skills are still needed in 2023.
2. The people in your organization are different. As I have attended more in-person gatherings and large group meetings over the past 6 months, often seeing geographically distant colleagues face-to-face for the first time in 3 years, I have noticed that the people involved in these meetings are not the same as they were 3 years ago. At a recent meeting for staff in a 10-state training project, we discovered that 60% of the people in the room had joined our team in the past 3 years! The average age in the room was also considerably younger than it would have been pre-pandemic. As a person who just turned 50, I have spent my whole professional career working with a large cadre of colleagues 15-20 years older than me, who generally controlled the resources and set the direction of the organization. A few of those folks still remain, usually in key leadership positions that they have held for years, but a large number have retired. Even in a volunteer organization such as a church, many of the people who held things together during the COVID-19 emergency are now tired and taking a well-earned rest. Suddenly I find that I'm one of the people with the most institutional memory and sense of how things are done, both because of my length of service with the organization and because many of my colleagues have only seen it operate during the pandemic. At this particular time, the majority of people in the room have zero experience with what I think of as our "normal" operations.
3. People have higher expectations for their organizations. Whether it's their employer, a church, a club, or another informal group, people have higher expectations for the organizations that they belong to. In a post last year I wrote about how leaders can modify their organizational culture to promote workers' mental health, and those considerations about burnout prevention and organizational wellness are still very much live issues. Workers want jobs that help them to live their best lives, and even with inflation and a softening labor market they are more prepared to leave jobs that aren't giving them that type of support. Pandemic life also disrupted many people's habitual associations with a church, a club, or a sport, leading them to drop activities that they didn't find rewarding. Organizations are now able to offer their customary services in close to the usual ways, but they will need to make a strong case for why people should want to associate with them at a time when social bonds are weaker and folks have come to view participation in a wide range of things as optional.
4. Organizations can't ignore societal shifts. The pandemic shined a spotlight on inequities in U.S. society, leading to a renewed focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion within many organizations. If you haven't prioritized these issues, now is the time! It's not going to continue being acceptable (if it ever was) for our organizations to ignore issues such as race and gender. Our multiple identities position us in the world and in relation to other people, and we need to learn how to recognize and talk about the position that we are speaking from (as I tried to do at the start of this blog post) instead of presuming we have access to objective truths. Of course, different members of the public will have varied reactions to any position that we might identify with, and we will need to live with the consequences of those reactions. But organizations can no longer finesse the issue or avoid talking about "sensitive" topics; the public will hold us accountable, and will see through any non-answers we might offer.
5. It's time to clarify the rules. Organizations have changed their policies and procedures many times over the past 3 years, usually on an emergency basis in response to new and unexpected circumstances. Those of us who have been with our organizations for many years might think that we know how things work, but after years of ad-hoc changes we are probably wrong on many counts. Those who are new to the organization might never have received a proper orientation, and might never have had the chance to ask colleagues in the hallway because fewer people are in the office on any given day. It's a good time to plan some extra training and reminders, to let everyone know how things actually work now. Communication patterns within organizations have also been severely disrupted, so over-communication is better than under-communication, using as many channels as possible (email, meetings, websites, one-to-one outreach, etc.). We also need to actively review enduring information sources like websites to make sure they don't include outdated information. Finally, those of us in leadership roles need to take a hard look at the mish-mash of policies and unwritten practices that our organizations have been using to survive these past 3 years: Some of them might be too strict, others too lenient, and others simply no longer match the environment we're in. With the expiration of COVID-related emergency declarations, we are going to have to live by the rules as written -- "we've been too busy to fix that" will no longer be a viable excuse. We should take the time to review the way we're operating and make sure that we have gotten the rules correct.
6. The future is hybrid. There are clear disadvantages to a distributed workforce: communication is more challenging, it's easier for people to become disengaged, and it's particularly challenging for new people to get oriented to an organization's culture and rules. Nevertheless, people have come to expect hybrid options, and that's what organizations need to plan on going forward. It's a good time to hold some in-person events, especially to help new people feel more connected. To make those as successful as possible: (a) give lots of advance notice, (b) talk up the benefits of in-person time together, and (c) plan an agenda with a few interesting content items but also lots of open networking time. And then recognize that some people still won't attend live, so offer hybrid options anyway. Big in-person events are energizing and promote a sense of bonding in groups, so do try to sell people on the benefits of in-person time. As I have said many times in this space, humans are social animals; we evolved to connect with others and consider their opinions, and those connections are stronger when they include face-to-face interactions, sharing meals, and other social bonding rituals. But don't shame or guilt-trip the people who can't or won't attend. Keep your in-person meetings more focused and less frequent than they were pre-pandemic; for routine daily operations, the best option is to give people a choice of in-person or remote participation. The only real alternative is to say that people who don't participate in person won't be part of your organization going forward -- some groups have tried that strategy, but it seems not to have been successful overall, because some of the best people will leave.
We've reached an inflection point in the COVID-19 pandemic, but its effects will be with us for years to come. It's time to move forward more deliberately into a "new normal" that takes into account everything we have learned since March 2020, when we first found ourselves in a different world.
Comments
Post a Comment