“You adapt or die. The dinosaurs didn’t and they aren’t around anymore.”
~Nick Saban
When the pandemic started, all of us had to be adjusted one way or another.
If you worked in an office, you learn to work from home. You learned how to work over Zoom or some other video conferencing service, do remote scheduling, check-in with your team to keep people connected, and much more.
If you worked in retail or a restaurant, you tried to figure out how to survive. Maybe you applied for a PPP loan to try to tide you over. Maybe, you dipped into your savings. Maybe you moved in with your parents to help you sustain yourself during these times.
We all bought masks. We wash our hands even more regularly. We shop online and when we go to stores, usually were more cautious than we were before.
We have been adapting to the changes that have been demanded whether we like it or not.
One day, we will be out of the pandemic. Enough of this will have been vaccinated to make this possible.
It may be hard to imagine but we will need to adapt again. What we have been doing will feel normal to us and returning to what was previously normal may feel difficult.
We will stop wearing masks. We will sit indoors in restaurants. We will meet with others again personally and professionally. It will feel joyously strained and awkward.
The weekend after 9/11, my wife and I attended a workshop in New Jersey at a university. We sat in a large conference room in front of beautiful windows overlooking the Hudson River and New York City. Where the World Trade Center once stood, you could still see smoke rising. Airplanes had been grounded since Tuesday. The country had come to a stop.
Saturday around midday, we saw airplanes starting to approach Newark airport. Many of us gasped, fearing this was another attack. Fortunately, it wasn’t. It was the beginning of a return to normalcy that we now take for granted.
We had no preparation for it but we adapted which, in the New York area, where many of us, myself included an experience of that day that is difficult to imagine.
And now, two decades later, the country is forgotten as it will with this.
How will you and your office adapt to the changes that are a few months away? Will you start to bring people back to the old office or let them continue to work from home? Will you expect that they will travel again or continue by video conference? If you work with external customers, what is there thinking about their expectations of you?
No one is asking these questions but they are on the horizon.
Can you anticipate that you will need to adapt to the “new old normal?”
Ⓒ The Big Game Hunter, Inc., Asheville, NC 2021
ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a career and leadership coach who worked as a recruiter for more than 40 years. He is
the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with more than 2000 episodes, and is a member of The Forbes Coaches Council.
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