SPECIAL FEATURE
RECOGNISE, REFLECT AND RESET
A Look in the Rear-View Mirror I had hoped to write of great learnings from this past year about a surge of organisations upgrading their Records Management disciplines, capabilities, and compliance. Didn’t happen. Surprisingly, when asked about the impact of the Covid pandemic, one company official (likely summing it up for many) responded “We didn’t skip a beat”. Well, countries skipped a beat, people skipped a beat, there were a lot of skipped beats. How did many organizations not skip a beat? It was the resilience of the worker. It was the resilience of the worker leveraging and adapting to available technologies, and working through conflicts and distractions, as they transitioned to working from home. BY CRAIG GRIMESTAD
24 | iQ December 2021
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he resilience of the worker was multi-faceted and varied depending on the individual circumstances. For those who were already working at home, full or part time, the changes and disruptions were minimal. For those who previously had been full time office workers, this was a monster, a real paradigm change. Motivated by the ability to keep their job and pay their bills, they worked hard to make it happen – and most did! New technologies had to be learned with proficiency. How many had heard of Zoom previously, let alone know how to use it? Videoconferencing? We had all likely done some of that. Now, videoconferencing became essential for meetings with customers, suppliers, and colleagues to conduct business. Text messaging and chats also became useful and essential in working with colleagues. As the isolating, required, stay at home time dragged on, workers began to experience “cabin fever”. How could workers preserve their mental health and wellbeing? How could workers replicate the social contacts of the office and the “water cooler” chats? Videoconferencing and technologies like Microsoft Teams, which allows for instant and ongoing communications with colleagues, became the mechanism to socialize
