COVID’s First Birthday: A View From the Brain

“One year of COVID” are the hot takes of the moment, from “Sorrow and stamina, defiance and despair” to numerical breakdowns to seemingly never-ending partisan bickering, and all points in between. We are going to add our voice to the chorus of COVID-at-1 stories, hopefully not in a nails on chalkboard fashion, but through the prism of organizational learnings, culture shifts, and most importantly, brain science.

The building never really created the culture

Before COVID, most white-collar knowledge workers inherently understood that “seat time” was somewhat of a relic, but it persisted for multiple generations and reasons, including the “Well, did you know Steve Jobs was a big believer in spontaneous connection?” argument, and the fact that seat time is an essential part of the “managerial control” toolkit. The idea that the building or physical location was an integral part of the culture was held up in many an all-hands speech about “needing the team here in Charlotte” and the like.

Early on in the pandemic, while meeting with dozens of CEOs to discuss their strategy for supporting their people through crisis, one of their biggest fears was that the organization’s culture would vanish if no one saw each other. Plus: how could on-boarding work if no one was really meeting and seeing each other beyond video?

Many leaders discovered two big surprises, however:

1. Their culture has remained intact—and may have even improved, with increased engagement, overall increased productivity, and in many organizations a stronger sense of connection. In fact, 76% of employees in recent research say their culture improved since they started working remotely.
2. They now have the benefits of a more uniform culture. In the past, you’d often see in-office HQ employees treated one way and experiencing one arm of culture, field employees another way, WFH employees another way, etc. Now more people feel more connected to the overall idea of the team and culture.

Consider both through the prism of the brain’s social function.

Our brain is deeply wired to pay close attention to social cues; a bird gets its resources for survival quite quickly by having great eyesight, so the bird brain has large areas devoted to vision. Humans, conversely, got 100% of their survival resources from other humans until around a dozen years old, and our brain has adapted accordingly. As a bird can see a worm from 100 feet in the air, we can see someone reacting badly to a poorly thought out comment from another colleague in a fraction of a second.

Reading these social cues in some ways is faster and easier when we can see a whole team’s faces in front of us, versus just the people sitting across from us at a table. At NLI, we see that culture is made up of shared everyday habits. These habits are shared through social interactions, and become rapidly normative without us even knowing.

In short, nap pods are nice, as are bars and pool tables scattered around your HQ. But that’s not your culture. Your culture comes from shared everyday habits, which can be just as salient in a zoom call as in a room together. Perhaps even more so.

Companies who truly care about people performed best through this time

We recently had the pleasure of doing a webinar and podcast with Martin Whitaker of JUST Capital. One tremendous resource for finding companies that care about people deeply is their COVID Corporate Response Tracker. This will show you companies that behaved in a fair and just way, specifically to employees—think adjusted hours, flexibility for child/elder care, and more—and how they performed in-market as well. It’s a different way to consider capitalism.

A lot of work elements changed, and drastically, a year ago. This had massive tentacles of repercussion, from child care to parent care to anxiety to stress to technical issues to Zoom fatigue to everything else. Organizations where all the people elements were lip service in the name of a fatter bottom line had the hardest time with these transitions. Organizations where leaders care about people, invest in them, talk to them, and help them to manage stress and anxiety had a much easier flip to COVID times.

Why is this the case? The pandemic increased people’s stress levels tremendously, many to the point of hardly being able to think. People craved:

• Any kind of sense of certainty
• A feeling of any kind of control
• A sense of connectedness with others

Companies that paid attention to human needs noticed these growing demands, and responded fast. HP and Patagonia were early-COVID examples of this deep caring, and Morningstar followed suit for its employees. To respond to parental COVID concerns, for example, they hosted discussion groups for parents to share pains and successes, curated third-party educational content, partnered with the Atlanta Center for the Puppetry Arts to deliver online puppet shows, and started to offer online exchanges where children of our employees can connect with each other. Their first event was a chance for them to build and share their Lego creations. These efforts boost employee’s sense of relatedness as they connect with colleagues facing the same challenges.

By addressing these core human needs, people’s stress came back to manageable levels, or what we call ‘Level 1 threat’, versus the unproductive Level 2 or 3. The result was employees adapting faster, responding to changing consumer needs faster, and simply put, were able to make it through with fewer days where we simply melted down.

The talent pool expanded

There were some beliefs in the beginning that talent pools would become constricted because of COVID. That’s true in industries where revenue was hit hardest by a pandemic; if you lack money, it’s hard to expand hiring anyway. But what happened, and quite logically, is that the talent pool expanded as a result of COVID. We already had some tools for remote hiring—admittedly not all of them are good—and talent teams became more comfortable with processes involved in hiring that doesn’t end with people coming on-site. Because more of the core work is being done virtually, there’s less mindset impediment to hiring the best Operations person you can find, even though they aren’t in Denver.

This also had the unexpected benefit of helping organizations increase their diversity. Partly this happened unconsciously, because by not seeing people face to face, you are less likely to be impacted by biases such as Similarity Bias, and accidentally hire more people who remind you of yourself. It was also a function of not being limited to hiring people who live within a reasonable distance of your office, which may be in high-cost-of-living areas such as Silicon Valley. This levelled the playing field, where people living in lower-income areas, often people of colour, are able to apply for a job based on their innate skills. Many organizations have taken advantage of this trend and are hiring people from a much wider set of zip codes than ever before, ensuring the best possible talent takes a role, not the best possible talent within a 30-minute commute.

We need to talk about Brenda

The Minneapolis Federal Reserve actually wrote a paper during COVID called “Why Is Mommy So Stressed?” and many have taken to calling this not a recession but a “she-cession.” The author of that Minneapolis Fed paper did an interview with Wharton recently, and noted: “I think, as soon as possible, there have to be some temporary and extraordinary measures to provide child care.” Some of the child tax credit approaches in the $1.9 trillion stimulus may help, but more discussion and reckoning here is needed.

Remember: Neuroscientists have shown that a sense of unfairness isn’t just a psychological phenomenon, it activates networks in the brain similar to physical pain or disgust. A sense of fairness is one of five domains that the brain constantly tracks—and COVID created a situation where many people experienced a strong sense of wrongness in the other four (status, certainty, autonomy, and relatedness) as well. If people are already feeling like they are lower status, experiencing uncertainty, have a reduced sense of control over events, feel like others don’t care about them, and feel intense unfairness, then you have hit all five domains, each of which on their own create a strong distress response in the brain.

We don’t totally know the impacts on mental health yet, but it might be OK!

There were two smaller-scale studies out of the EU based on early COVID data. The first one studied people’s feelings of social connection and relatedness under quarantine. After a few weeks, the vast majority of people reported little to no drop in feelings of social connectedness, including extraverts. And while many people reported increased feelings of lethargy, overall life satisfaction was barely affected. The second study looked at a group of Dutch students and found that mental health problems did not increase over a measured three-week period in March and April. In fact, early on, mental health problems slightly decreased. There’s a belief that people might emerge from COVID with healthy savings accounts and a pent-up desire for travel and a new roaring 20s, so maybe that joy will carry over to in-work engagement as well. It will take decades for us to completely understand the mental health ramifications of lockdown, virtual school, and more—but perhaps it’s not as dire as we thought.

It is possible to build a better normal

Another big surprise for organizations in the last year was just how quickly they were able to shift to nearly everyone working from home. A process they might have imagined should take years and maybe needed months, was universally done in about a week. This started to open minds: what other big changes could happen quickly if we really focused?

The pandemic helped ‘unfreeze’ how we work. Suddenly, we’re able to reinvent just about anything. On top of this, the public is keen to see real improvements from corporations as a result of this period. And finally, there is research showing that people are most open to big changes when other changes are going on. All of this points to the insight that this is a great time to reinvent–to build a better normal versus just go back to how things were.

To be frank, a lot of what was happening inside companies pre-COVID wasn’t all that great to begin with. This was a natural experiment and change agent that was handed to us. There are processes and assumptions you can take a sledgehammer to because the very nature of work and connection is different. If you truly want to be an innovative, experimental, avant-garde culture, now’s a tremendous time to change something, however small (“all virtual meetings need to begin with a 2-minute icebreaker”), test, see the results, and iterate. Or as we say at NLI, “Follow the science, Experiment, Follow the data.” There’s no time like the present, and in COVID times, that’s doubly true.