Life is about changes. Sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes it’s beautiful. But most of the time, it is both!

The COVID - 19 Pandemic has turned our lives upside down and is challenging us as a nation, as a state and as individuals in ways we never imagined.

As we necessarily learn the finer points of social distancing, we ask ourselves: Will I have a job? Will I contract the infection? What will happen after lockdown is over? Several questions are ruining our minds every day.

But today while I was thinking, I thought let me try to analyse & note some positive points from this COVID – 19 impact.

There are going to be some incredible natural experiments that are already being run and they are going to be analysed. We are going to be able to see what the effect is of having to work from home on productivity at a scale that is never been tested before. We are also going to learn something about what happens to people's creativity and connection when they cannot interact face-to-face with their colleagues.

We are eagerly waiting to recuperate to our normal lives, but post this difficult time how do we make sure that we learn from this experience?

Learning from an experience like this comes from reflection. As people come out of this crisis and start coming back to work, the first thing that I will do is discuss what everyone has learnt from the experiments they ran. Some of those experiments were by force, others were by choice, but we all will have our sets of trials and errors made in order to survive the quarantine.

I would like to hear what everyone tested out, what worked best for them and what did not, and then keep evolving what we thought were our best practices and continue doing it.

Is this particularly an opportunity for managers to know their team?

I think this is a great time for leaders to be more hands-off when it comes to scheduling and planning. Where leaders may need to be a little bit more hands-on is in figuring out how their people are doing on a day-to-day basis. This is one place where leaders have an opportunity to learn.

How many times does it happens that a manager has scheduled a one on one session with their subordinates with the intention of knowing them? Maybe this difficult time serve as a good time to make this happen over a call.

Has this difficult time levelled up the playing field for Introverts?

We are now sitting on video calls all day, as opposed to saying: "You know what, maybe we should have fewer meeting”.

Due to number of video calls and zoom meeting taking place every day, people who were once hesitant of talking are getting more comfortable with speaking their thoughts. They have started liking the entire process of discussing, communicating with their colleagues be it for any official work or just inquiring about each other’s well-being. So, if we see the bigger picture once this is over there should not be any introverts or extroverts’ groups but instead individuals working for the organisation and most importantly for themselves.

Are there any positive takeaways from this difficult situation?

We are going to see a lot of employers embrace more flexibility around working from home and having virtual teams. They are going to find out that it was not as difficult as they thought it was, and there are some productivity gains that come from not having to commute and getting to work where you want.

On an individual level, there are some people who must have faced anxiety attacks during this lockdown period due to overthinking the situation. But on the brighter side this period might have also given them the time to evaluate the post lockdown situation and introspect their ability to deal with it. I would like to cite this sense as Post-traumatic strength. It might be a sense of personal strength, it could be a deeper sense of gratitude, it could be finding new meaning or investing more in relationships.

So, you cannot go back and change the beginning, but you can always have the ending you want!