The COVID Generation

This week, for the first time in what feels like forever, I found myself with time to sit down and reflect on the past couple of months. Not just as the CEO of a global company, but also as a friend, son, husband, and father. I found myself thinking about the impact that this event would have on all the people that I hold so dear to my heart. How will this impact my father and his generation? And what about my children? Will they remember this? How will it change their generation?

Then it dawned on me. What we are witnessing right now is the creation of a new generation. The COVID generation. One that transcends all existing generations. In the short term, our collective objective is survivability. We are all adapting to new ways of doing things out of pure necessity. The question then becomes, how much of this change is temporary, and how much of it becomes the new normal?

When I think about all the fantastic work the Dental Monitoring team has done over the past 6 weeks, one thing that is striking to me is that we were able to do all of this remotely. It got me thinking about what we do as a company as things start to get back to normal. Will some people be concerned about coming back for health reasons? Will they now simply prefer to work from home sometimes? Most importantly, what if it wasn't really up to me? If the new normal involves employees preferring to work from home, then how can we continue to recruit the best people if we don't accommodate this in some way?

As business leaders, we will find ourselves needing to answer many questions like this over the coming weeks and months. The challenge is to recognize that there are both great risks, and great opportunity in a post-pandemic World and the key to realizing the opportunity is forcing yourself to see things through the lens of your customers.

Almost every industry will be forced to make decisions about how to adapt. How do you adapt as a restaurant owner in a World where people are hesitant to be around others? How do you adapt as a public speaker in a World without events? 

At Dental Monitoring, our customers are the doctors that we work with from around the world. I'm so proud of the work our team has done over the past couple of months to help to keep our doctors connected to their patients during a time of crisis, but what I'm even more proud of is the work our team has done over the past five years. I've never been more confident in our mission and the role we have to play in helping our doctors succeed in this new World.