What If the Best Thing the Pandemic Did Was Make Us Rethink Work?
For years, many organisations believed they couldn't change the way work was done.
For example, before COVID, no one was doing workshop online. Well, I was, but it was a hard slog to get people to engage in it.
Then the pandemic arrived and suddenly everyone was becoming more comfortable with doing business online. Almost overnight, teams found new ways to communicate, collaborate and deliver results. What we thought wasn't possible suddenly became necessary, and it worked.
Patty McCord's TED Talk “4 Lessons the Pandemic Taught Us About Work, Life an Balance” is a great reminder that some of the biggest workplace lessons came from a period none of us would choose to repeat. The real opportunity now is deciding how we take those lessons forward.
Why did the pandemic change the way we work?
The pandemic removed the luxury of waiting and seeing. We just couldn’t do that. None of us knew how long this thing was gin to last.
When restrictions appeared, people adapted really quickly. Teams learned to work virtually and redesign processes. The belief that "we can't" was replaced with evidence that we actually can.
For years, barriers such as industry requirements, or ‘just how it’s done’ were used as reasons to avoid change. The pandemic challenged those assumptions and showed that innovation will be born out of necessity.
Are work and family really separate?
For many people, the difference between work and home became blurred during the pandemic. Family responsibilities became obvious in ways they never had before. We found ourselves having to balance new situations.
Video calls revealed the reality of everyday life. Children appeared onscreen. Pets wandered through meetings. Caring duties became impossible to hide. Suddenly, work and family were sharing the same space.
This experience reminded us that teams are not families. Families have different responsibilities, priorities and commitments. Suddenly we were starting to understand the difference between work family and real family, and some of us started to set clearer boundaries.
What happens when we treat people like adults at work?
Trust becomes more important than supervision. For decades, many workplaces relied on visibility as a measure of productivity. If someone was at their desk, they must be working!
Remote work challenged that thinking.
Instead of monitoring presence, leaders had to pay attention to the actual outcomes.
This change encouraged organisations to:
Focus on results
Increase autonomy
Reduce unnecessary control
Trust people to manage competing priorities
What are best practices anyway?
As much as I hated the pandemic, I love how it challenged the idea that there is one perfect way to run an organisation. Every organisation faced unique circumstances and needed unique solutions.
Rather than copying what other organisations were doing, teams had to figure out what worked specifically for them.
Questions changed from:
What is everyone else doing?
What would a leading organisation do?
To:
What does success look like for us?
What helps our team do its best work?
Don’t you think that’s a much stronger place to start.
How can organisations help people make better decisions?
People make better decisions when they understand how the organisation works and what it is trying to achieve. So that kind of context will create confidence.
Patty McCord in her TED Talk suggests that organisations should teach people how the business operates.
That includes helping teams understand:
Financial performance
Organisational goals
What different teams are trying to achieve
How success is measured
When people understand the bigger picture, they can make good decisions without waiting for direction on every detail.
Why is communication more important than ever?
Clear and consistent communication needs to reach everyone directly.
Traditional communication structures weren’t great to start with. Virtual work exposed the weaknesses.
Effective communication today requires:
Clarity
Consistency
Regular updates
Intentional check-ins
People perform better when they have the information, they need to make good, informed decisions.
What can leaders learn from small daily reflections?
Simple reflection helps organisations identify patterns, improve processes and address the outdated habits.
One practical suggestion I liked from Patty McCord is to write down one thing that worked and one thing that didn't work each day.
After several weeks, trends start to emerge.
You might discover:
A meeting that adds little value
A communication method that works surprisingly well
A process nobody misses
A better way to collaborate
Workplace practices should we leave behind
One of the biggest lessons from the pandemic is that not everything we stopped doing needs to return. Some processes just added complexity without really adding any value.
Many organisations discovered they could function absolutely fine without:
Multiple layers of approval
Excessive bureaucracy
Outdated performance processes
Habits maintained just because that’s way we’ve always done it.
I hope by now we no longer are considering how quickly we can return to old ways of working. A better way of thinking can now be what do we want to build next.
Perhaps the most valuable lesson from the pandemic was more about discovering that we had the capability to change and quickly adapt all along.
As Patty McCord reminds us, the future of work isn't is about keeping the lessons worth keeping and having the courage to rethink the rest.
Source: TED Talk by Patty McCord, 4 lessons the pandemic taught us about work, life and balance.
What's Next?
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