Preparing For A Post-Pandemic World

There’s a sense of anticipation that builds for the end of a long, trying period, more of the expected relief as much as any joy you might feel. In talking with someone with a military background, he describes both the weight lifted at the end of a nine-month deployment and the apprehension that follows soon thereafter. You’ve upended your life for a significant amount of time and settled into a familiar alternate reality, only to be thrust back into what was once normalcy and is now an experience vaguely familiar and utterly foreign. The adjustment to your old life takes time, assuming you’re able to adjust at all.  

We’ve not been asked to do anything as dramatic as deploy overseas, but our experience with quarantine and lockdown has been a significant change for an extended period, one that created a lot of stress and necessitated a different way of approaching our work. Even those of us easily able to shift our businesses to be entirely online have had to deal with the challenges imposed by the outside world, whether they be economic, medical, or simply the anxiety that results from the fear of walking out your front door. 

Returning to our old life isn’t as easy as shifting back into an old routine. Whatever belief exists that we’ll be back to our old selves, pandemic squarely in the rearview, is likely misguided, at least as it pertains to most people. It’s hard to live through something like what we have and not be changed by the experience, and to have that change manifest in how we act and feel. Even shifts towards the normal that might seem for the better can be hard to come to grips with for many people.

Families that might make light of their excitement to get some distance from one another might have a hard time when the day actually comes to go back into the office, assuming it hasn’t already arrived. That may particularly be the case for parents of young children who have come to treasure their time at home together even with all of the challenges of balancing work with child care. Both you and your employees should be prepared for that transition to perhaps hit a little harder than expected emotionally.

The work may remain the same, but the office experience promises to be changed going forward. In addition to any distancing measures that are mandated in order to reopen, it would be impossible to avoid the ambient thrum of anxiety that permeates every public setting at the moment. Most of us recognize that the COVID-19 is not solved but rather somewhat mitigated, and so every day in the world and in the office comes with a certain amount of risk that didn’t previously exist, and wasn’t agreed to in any hiring process. Some companies may not have the luxury of keeping employees working from home indefinitely, and so for those asking workers back into an office, there is a bit of fear to go with the process of establishing old habits and patterns within a group dynamic. 

Those inter-office concerns are only magnified when considering the work that has to be done outside of your walls. Many businesses are or have been reliant upon the face-to-face relationship with clients and customers. Despite all the newly-gained insight on how Zoom calls can replace the meeting, it might be impossible to remove physical proximity from your business and sales model altogether in the long term. Do you have a plan in place for when social distancing measures are lifted, and is it one that passes muster with the best medical practices promulgated as well as the employees that are asked to take this measured but significant risk? So much of the anxiety we see in our society at large has been prompted as much by the lack of coherent planning and preventative measures, so it’s incumbent upon leaders to do their part to demonstrate how they plan to lessen risks, and even if it’s just in the workplace, that represents a space where most people spend a significant amount of their day. 

Getting back to a world that resembles something like normal isn’t as easy as it might seem. Humans, to our credit, adapt over time to the situation, and returning to what we did only a few months ago will take time as well. We all have to recognize the fact that neither business or people operate like a light switch, and be prepared to help one another through this difficult period in our history. #onwards.

Speak Your Mind

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Get in Touch

350FansLike
100FollowersFollow
281FollowersFollow
150FollowersFollow

Recommend for You

Oh hi there 👋
It’s nice to meet you.

Subscribe and receive our weekly newsletter packed with awesome articles that really matters to you!

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

You might also like

Stocks in focus on July 30, 2020

New Delhi:  Equity benchmark Sensex plunged 422 points on Wednesday as profit-booking emerged in...

Shutdowns, alerts and more rules: This is how UK...

A waitress wearing a face mask or covering due to the Covid-19 pandemic, takes...

TransferWise partners with Alipay for international money transfers

TransferWise, the London-headquartered international money transfer service most recently valued by investors at $3.5...

Council Post: Letting Company Values Guide You In The...

Jon Bostock is the Co-Founder and CEO of Truman's and the Best-Selling Author of The Elephant's...