Personal and Professional Reflections on COVID-19

Two weeks ago my 92 year old uncle has passed away as a result of contracting COVID. Like everyone thus affected, to me and my extended family he was so much more than a statistic to be included in today's briefing. As an Augustinian Friar, my uncle Der was an integral part of every part of my extended family, having conducted pretty much every marriage, baptism and funeral from the late 1950s to the late 2010s. That's 40+ marriages, 60+ baptisms and 8 funerals - big Irish family! He touched hundreds of lives for the better with his wisdom, kindness, humility and good humour. As someone without religious faith, I will always think of him as an inspiration and as someone well worth trying to emulate, in manner if not in vocation. His passing has acted as the stimulus for me to write this piece.

 A week later my second grandson was born, starting a journey through a world and a time that will bear little resemblance to that through which my uncle lived. So in a time or mourning, there is joy and hope for the future.

 The confluence of these events, both expected but clearly one more welcome than the other, it has made me think about the COVID pandemic, the different responses to it around the world and what our lives may look like in the future.

 I've been involved in business continuity and pandemic response planning since the late 1990s and so have taken great interest in the different ways in which political and business leaders in different countries and cultures have responded. The common theme is that very big, very difficult decisions have had to be made and the choices available have largely depended upon the degree to which such a pandemic was foreseen and planned for. 

 Some nations, such as South Korea, which suffered badly from SARS not so long ago, was exceptionally well prepared with not only contingency plans for shutting the country down, but also with strong public messaging, a supportive and understanding population. They also had plentiful supplies of essential personal protective equipment and the capacity to produce testing kits as soon as the virus had been identified. Other nations, such as the UK and USA have been less decisive and, tragically as a result, less effective in controlling the spread of the disease and the resulting fatalities.

 But my aim here is not to find fault with our national and business leaders in terms of how the initial response to the crisis has been managed - there are millions of such voices already filling the airwaves and social media with opinions of all kinds, some well informed, others less so. My intent is to look at what happens next in terms of the ways in which our working and personal lives will be changed by this crisis, and the ways in which our world, our nations and our businesses might look once the crisis has passed and we are all immunised against COVID-19.

 Innovation and change can result from sparks of inspiration or necessity - we are living in a period of sudden and forced innovation-through-necessity in order to keep our businesses alive whilst in lockdown. Many organisations have traditionally not allowed staff to bring their own devices to the workplace, but this crisis has forced a change of attitude to BYOD due to the lack of supplies and the logistical challenges involved with enabling every one of our colleagues to work from their homes.

 This has, I believe, taught us one lesson more than any other, which is that working from an office has been the norm not through need but through habit, and many colleagues might not need to work from an office every day, ever again. This not to diminish the positive aspects of working in communal offices such as the informal and social connections we make every day. It does, however, beg the question of whether in future we will need to maintain such a large real estate footprint.

 The restrictions on travel have also made a clear difference in a number of ways. Every day we see reports of reduced air pollution in cities due to the reduction in vehicular traffic. Look at the sky and the reduction in air traffic is plain to see. The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is not so visible but must be very significant across the globe. Video conferencing has become so popular that the service providers have struggled to keep up with demand and at times the services we depend on as a company have seemed to be creaking. We have observed our government's leaders making some pretty elementary cyber security mistakes using insecure video conferencing technology, and reports from school teachers and others of their video conferences being photo-bombed, sometimes in disturbing and highly inappropriate ways. As an information security professional these stories have served to remind me that as we adapt to these new ways of working, we need to ensure that everyone is educated and trained on good information security hygiene and how to configure the services they use to ensure that, for example, their meeting ID is not publicly searchable.

 Initially, we were told to restrict ourselves to "only essential travel". Did we all interpret this in the same way? I very much doubt it and I am sure I am as guilty as the next person of classifying a trip as "essential" when, with hindsight, it wasn't. As life returns to normal, will we travel as much for business purposes as we used to? I suspect we will exercise more self-control and use video conferencing more often, not least because the current predictions relating to air travel are that it is going to get more expensive. Some meetings are obviously best done face-to-face, as Simon Sinek maintains in his book "Leaders Eat Last", building trust is something that only truly happens when we are together in person. We are social animals and need social interaction to remain sane. We need to meet our clients and colleagues, but will we consider working practices such as requiring every member of a team to be "in the room" all day, every day as either effective or appropriate in our "new normal"? As each day passes, I find myself looking forward more to the moment when it will be possible to shake a colleague by the hand or hug a friend or family member.

 There will also come a time, and it will be soon, when we need to start making concrete plans for societies re-opening once the initial crisis has passed. What criteria will decision-makers use? What types of businesses will be permitted to re-open and in what order and over what period? How will supply chains get back to normal if they are not re-opened in the right sequence and what sequence would that be? If you start with producers of raw materials, will they have enough space to stock pile those materials until their customers reopen? If it is the retailer or builders merchant that is allowed to re-open first but they have only limited stock and no deliveries, how will they keep solvent until normal delivery schedules and quantities are restored? The list of such questions is long and complex but all will need to be addressed, preferably by people with relevant expertise and experience.

 Since we can only guarantee that there will not be a further spike in infections and resulting casualties until there is wide-spread vaccination, and that is not likely to be less than 12 months away, I imagine that the process of re-opening will have to be very carefully planned and even more carefully executed. The way in which these processes are communicated will be at least as important as how they are managed in order to garner public support - especially at a time where in some nations, public trust in political leaders is low.

 So, in order to be better prepared for the end of the pandemic than we all were for its beginning, the questions all organisational leaders need to be asking themselves should include:

•  What lessons have we learned about how prepared we are for major disruption?
• Did our corporate behaviour match the implications of statements like "our people are our greatest asset"?
• If something like this happens again, what would we do differently?
• Do our people trust us to lead them through the recovery from this crisis?
• Which of our staff really need to return to working in an office full-time?
• Which of the temporary measures we have permitted should be embedded as normal working practices?
• Are the days of the desk-bound worker over?
• What does "essential travel" now mean?
• How best to stagger the return to "normal operations" in order not to cause further disruption?

 This isn't an attempt at an exhaustive list, but an idea of the kinds of questions normally associated with an "after action review" and as such, hopefully a way of starting a discussion on how we might emerge from this crisis healthier, stronger and more united as teams, business units, organisations and communities. Each of us will have a part to play, however small, and being personally prepared for the next stages will be important if we are to come through this stronger. So please, think about how you can contribute to the recovery and resumption phases, and continue to reach out to your team mates and friends across your business and community, especially those most in need of human contact. We can turn this crisis into a new beginning. Why don't we?