COVID Culture Goes Viral

 A new paradigm for how we work?…Maybe so.

Kenneth Miller | April 2020

Social Distancing.

Self-quarantine.

Shelter in place.

Mandatory work-at-home.

Terms few of us had ever heard until a month or so ago are now part of the common lexicon, and while they may be unlikely to define a ‘new normal’, it’s entirely possible—maybe probable—that some or many of the measures we’ve been forced into in the interests of personal and public health will ‘stick’, portending some potentially significant structural shifts in how we live and work.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal under the banner. “Coronavirus Will Permanently Change How we Work“, Matt Burr and Becca Endicott opine,

          “The age of the office as we know it is probably over, and the bell can’t be unrung“.

And a freshly-minted Gallup survey highlights “unprecedented disruption due to COVID-19”, with 81% of respondents saying it has disrupted their life “a great deal” or ”a fair amount”, while the number of full-time employees working from home because of COVID-19 closures has reached 61%.

It’s certainly true that changes in how we work were already in process when most people still thought Corona referred only to a Mexican beer. The idea of working at home was in ascendancy—presumably prodded to some degree by the growth of the ‘gig economy’—well in advance of the virus making its leap from bat to human, as were alternative scenarios such as co-working. But the pandemic has shown itself an able accelerant.

With over 300 million Americans either ordered or urged to shelter in place, the number of people working from home—as Gallup documented—has skyrocketed, forcing companies and institutions to rapidly adapt to the new reality that has been thrust upon them.

Predictably, this has sent the consulting industry into overdrive, and unleashed a torrent of articles, webinars, YouTube videos, TED Talks, etc, offering extensive menus of solutions to the various challenges of leading a remote workforce in troubled times.

Regardless of the medium, these all tend to advocate a fairly wide variety of cyber tools—Zoom, Slack, 15Five, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, TINYpulse, etc—and an even wider array of techniques—All Hands ‘Boosts’, weekly ‘check-ins’, ‘AMAs’ (Ask-Me-Anythings), daily stand-ups, Troop Talks, OKRs, V2MOMs, etc. But most pretty much stick to a fairly common set of principles, which can be distilled to less than a dozen or so recurring key words:

  • Autonomy
  • Communication
  • Transparency
  • Recognition
  • Empathy
  • Connectedness
  • Community
  • Caring
  • Wellness

Recognizing that some of these are probably redundant should not distract from what we think is the larger question, to wit:

Are these principles that should guide our approach to leadership of a distributed workforce—crisis-driven or not—or are these principles that should guide our approach to leadership, full-stop?

We think the latter.

Indeed, it is well-documented that companies and institutions that are (1) driven by Vision, (2) governed by Values, and (3) led by Enlightened Leaders—those for which a culture of Engagement is a pre-existing condition—are implicitly more adaptable and resilient, and have unsurprisingly shown themselves far more readily able to adjust to suddenly emergent realities with which they are or may hence be confronted. If a positive engagement culture was an essential element of organizational success a year ago–and it was–it’s a vital one now. Nothing less than the survival of the organization may depend upon it. 

Peter Drucker is famously cited as having said, ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’, but the title of Dr Gustavo Grodnitzky’s 2014 book may even more aptly say it all:  Culture Trumps Everything.

The ‘next normal’ is yet to be defined, and uncertainty abounds. But decisions made today determine what tomorrow will look like. The large majority of organizations lacking the pre-existing condition of a fully optimized culture might do well to consider the wisdom of our favorite old Chinese Proverb (yes, we get the irony):

“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.
The second-best time is now.”