Management Perspectives

The pain and loss of this era in human history cannot be overstated. No individual or organisation wants the disruption the global COVID-19 pandemic has brought to every country and many businesses. The pain, in different ways, is real for everyone. So is the need to continue sustaining and growing environments where employees and teams can be successful. Every leader, when faced with unexpected change, has a culture opportunity.

Culture, in general, is the beliefs, values, and behaviours that are observable in a group. When organisational life is normal, patterns often continue because they existed before. High-performing organisations assume a high functioning culture. As a result, the good times make culture change difficult. Even when a business struggles, busyness, structural barriers, and human inertia prevent reflection and intentional shifts to make a culture more effective and impactful. When crisis happens, however, what was once intractable becomes open. Cultural norms can be analysed and adjusted. Leaders who did not have time or appetite for change demand new ways of thinking and working.

The context for culture opportunities in these COVID times revolve around three distinct reality shifts: virtual communication, radically different work patterns, and uncertainty. While virtual communication was already being used effectively around the world, business travel for in-person meetings and conferences was expected. The first year of this pandemic has altered that. Many organisations realise you can do many of the things we thought had to be done in person more efficiently and intimately through virtual video platforms. In addition to travel, work patterns in the office involved movement and micro interactions that promoted informal creativity and trust-building. Work patterns in many industries have now changed forever, as where we work and the way we interact transition. Uncertainty is the most significant trigger for the opportunity over the next year or more. When will the vaccine arrive? When will it be safe to work like we used to? What will my market and customer look like in a post-COVID world? Who do we need to be as a company to reach people in the new reality? Uncertainty catalyses the need to be different.

The first opportunity every business can take advantage of is technological integration. If you wanted to do something virtual or web-based before, your culture will be more or entirely welcoming of the new systems. Transactions and interactions that had to happen in person before 2020 now are exclusively happening online. This includes work internally and with partners and customers. Whether history, fear of change, or cost prevented tech solutions from becoming the standard, the business case can now be made in real time.

The second opportunity is to create an effective hybrid culture. What used to be assumed face or office time can now be shifted in part or wholly to virtual work. In no way is face-to-face work gone. In fact, we now realise how important it is. It is simply not the only way to build connections and make decisions. The question to ask around how to gather people for every interaction is: “What will create the most creativity and trust with the least disruption?” Your yearly conference where you gathered everyone from around the country or world, hundreds or thousands of people, can become an every-other-year event with quarterly summits virtually. Your monthly team meetings that had a travel budget can be scheduled to less often and the spend can be more productive. Saving money and time on travel is not only an operational efficiency opportunity, that is the money you can reinvest in people and sustainable talent development solutions.

Purposeful reflection, for individuals and teams, is the third opportunity to deepen the lives and work of every employee during COVID. We used to have built-in reflection and think time during travel, on a commute, and in between meetings. Without realising it, learning happened. Our best ideas rarely hit during the staff meeting. They happen before, on the way to work or after walking to lunch. With less travel and movement, cultures have to encourage people, even demand people purposefully schedule reflection time. This is work. This is where great ideas happen.

The tech integration, hybrid work, and intentional reflection create a fourth opportunity: assign a micro interaction manager. Whether you make it the job of every manager or make it a function of HR or administration leaders, someone needs to keep track of what used to happen at lunch. When people spent time getting coffee, lingering after meetings, or getting together after work, the real ideas popped. Formality produces order. Casual micro interaction in a culture creates connection and the honest dialogue that results. Interactions now need someone to curate and foster them so that they happen at all. Whether this is extra chat time before a meeting, virtual meals or social time, or creative projects. As every cruise ship has a social director, every culture needs the facilitator of casual creativity and trust building.

In a similar way, COVID invites us to pay special attention to mentoring. As micro interaction was built into culture, so was the show and tell of best practice. When we worked together in offices, you as a leader could call someone into your office to listen to a call. You could invite them last minute to observe a pitch or presentation. You could invite them for a coffee after a meeting and explore what they did well and could improve upon. Now, mentorship needs scheduled time. Back-to-back-to-back virtual meetings are bad for people’s health. Intentional reflection, micro interaction, and mentoring facilitation will actually transform the connections in your culture in a way that will only enrich future face-to-face time.

With the connection building, a richer awareness of who people really are can become opportunity six. For the first time in the modern era, we are all having a global, shared experience we can talk about. In different ways, the pandemic hits all of our lives. Our health, our movement, and our schedules: the change is ubiquitous. So is the chance to ask someone how they are doing. So is the chance to get to know someone on a deeper level. Such is the unique moment where we can see each other’s dogs, cats, and children on the screen in homes and home offices. That personal awareness of each other’s real lives is a chance to be more empathetic. It is often the missing understanding that creates a cold, disconnected culture. You cannot fight the intimacy of knowing more about someone’s whole life. When that connection is valued, people feel like they matter more and business conversation loses some of its stilted barriers. The culture opportunity now is to be professional and personal.

Finally, as we wonder how to build new relationships when we cannot travel as easily, do not ignore how easy it is now to video travel around the world. While we have to be very sensitive to Zoom fatigue and over scheduling, we can also be invitational to colleagues, partners, and potential new relationships. If you have an idea you want someone’s advice on, everyone— whether they want the video on or off—can more easily accept your invitation. They do not have to go through the formality of an office visit.

They can spend a few minutes with you, and if the interaction works, suddenly your market, your team, your opportunity is not limited by budgets, time zones, and past expectations. Every one of these opportunities was already happening in the old world. Now, the barriers are down. The needs of today are different. But the chance to make changes will not last. Humans love tradition and it has value. What has even more impact are the intentional connections you build and the way you attend to your culture as it is vulnerable. The trust you build from the efforts can become the new cultural norm.