Many people are marking the one-year anniversary of this pandemic so I thought I’d give it a go. I’m not pretending to be a pundit – these are just some personal reflections.
One year ago, I drove to Kingston to collect two of our three kids from school. My wife came home to Ottawa early from a well-deserved skiing mini-break and our eldest son got a work-from-home order from his employer in Montreal.
For my family, as for many, the shift to remote work was a massive change. For me the huge change wasn’t remote work (my company Innovus had been working to that business model for years). Rather it was me transitioning from work-from-home guy with an office with a nice view of our backyard to work with five other adults in the home, all clamouring for Wi-Fi, carrying on extensive and numerous Zoom/MS Teams meetings and (sometimes loud) conference calls and all needing effective workspaces. I wisely gave up the home office to my wife after less than two days so she could carry on with her meetings (many more than me) with a modicum of privacy. Like many of you, I worked all over the house: dining room table, bedroom, kitchen island, TV room, basement etc.
With the advent of remote work, I felt a bit of justification of my business model for Innovus, the Microsoft Dynamics CRM/365 professional services company I established in 2006. Since that time, all of our team members worked primarily from home, negating long commutes, shrinking all of our carbon footprints and realising an opportunity to create some different form of work-life balance (at least that’s how I felt about it J). All the while we were laser focused on providing value-added, outcomes-driven solutions that enabled our customers to be better at what they already did well. We still built valuable relationships with clients and consultants and, yes, we did face-to-face meetings. However, over the past fifteen years pre-pandemic most of our clients in the not-for-profit and private sectors became very comfortable with this remote approach. Unfortunately, we had to move away from the federal public sector as a market as they were mostly stuck to the rather antiquated notion that external consulting teams needed to be located on-site but that’s another story.
The pace of change during the pandemic has been breathtaking and technology has helped in a huge way. We’ve all become pretty used to remote work and the revelation that we can be extremely productive in this mode of operation (even if we don’t all love it). But human interaction remains a cornerstone of our social and commercial lives and we will look forward to restoring that as the pandemic eases.
So now in my mind there are two key areas to think about: first, how much will we return to a business/working “normal”; and second, as the pandemic subsides, how can we return to addressing one of the most important challenges facing us in the form of climate change (I credit our three adult kids with moving that to the forefront for me). I’d like to share some of my thoughts on those two in a couple of upcoming separate posts.
Hope everyone stays safe – we’re not out of this yet but there is an emerging light . . .