COVID-19 exit – Are you ready? Given the current situation, what has determined and will continue to determine each organization’s success is the caliber of its leadership and management By Clinton Wingrove
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play as big a part in them as any business analysis. What has determined and will continue to determine each organization’s success is the caliber of its leadership and management. If organizations believe that going into lockdown was a huge challenge, they should wait and see what trying to come out of it will be like! To quote the WHO’s May 11th report, “… Case and death incidence … remains at the highest level since the beginning of the pandemic. … While India continues
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rganizations that responded best to the onset of the pandemic, and especially the lockdown, were those with managers used to forward planning, used to risk assessment, and used to create innovative solutions rapidly with their teams. Those same organizations will cope best with the potential exit from the lockdowns. But, let’s be clear. It has not been solely the prompt adoption of work from home (WFM) policies or the use of virtual networking platforms such as ZOOM, MS Teams, Blue Jeans, etc that enabled some to excel while others have struggled. Nor will it be the decision to remain with WFM, or to go for a hybrid approach, or even to demand that everyone comes back to work that will determine a successful exit from lockdown. Those decisions are relatively trivial and societal pressure will
to account for 95% of cases and 93% of deaths in the South-East Asia Region … worrying trends have been observed in neighboring countries …” This isn’t over and it won’t be for some time to come. We need to learn to work with it! We now know that there have been unforeseen consequences of remote working: • Cognitive disconnect – the informal flow of information all but ceased. Even our attention levels have dropped and we do not consciously hear anywhere near as much in virtual meetings as we did face-to-face. • Emotional distance – while many of us have more meetings and meet with more people, there is increasing evidence that being blobs on a screen does not generate the emotional connection that face-to-face, full-body visibility, produces. We are having more but far weaker relationships • Organizations thinking of running talent reviews (which have always suffered from poor quality
Globally, organizations now face uncertainty about when they will be able to achieve a new normal – while Europe and the USA, among others, are preparing to come out of lockdown, cases of new variants are rising rapidly and threatening to create new waves of infection and deaths june 2021 |
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