Think you’re the same person as you were before COVID? Think again.
*I wrote and shared this piece with my newsletter subscribers last Friday. If you’re interested in subscribing to my weekly newsletter, sign up here.
Are you feeling as hungover today as I am from that Ontario provincial election last night?! 😲 If there is anything that worries me today, it’s the low voter turn out (lowest provincial voter turn out in history at 43%), that two of our four political parties don’t have leaders now and I seriously question what our province will look like 4 years from today.
I had another email newsletter prepped about values to send to you.
But after seeing what happened last night with people not getting out to vote as drastically as it turned out, today feels like the day to share a conversation with you, that I’ve had a few times more recently in different circles.
I’ve shared some of these sentiments with different people and I thought I’d share with you here because they speak to what we’re starting to see with you and I — people living and adjusting to our post-pandemic world….
We aren’t the same people we were before COVID. If as an employer, business or brand, you think you’re going to operate as you did before COVID as we adjust to this ‘new normal,’ think again. Our world is different, we are different and our future will be different because of this. Anticipate, expect and plan for this. Hybrid communicating, working and living will be the biggest thing to address. We will spend coming months and years, adjusting to a ‘hybrid’ way of doing.
We can’t expect people to operate in the same way we did before COVID, after asking of us what we did, to get through COVID and *still* perform and work like we did. Don’t think or ask people to operate the way we did prior to COVID or refer to ‘the way we did things before COVID.’
We’re going to become exhausted — especially after getting use to this ‘no mask’ lifestyle of in-person events again and social gatherings. As much as we’ve been excited and longing for the personal interaction with others, these in-person events will leave us drained.. and we have to be ready for this personally and professionally.
We should fully anticipate that hard(er) times are ahead. Hard to believe I’m saying that — after living through the pandemic we just did. Inflation, continuing rising costs, the dreaded *r* word of recession starting to float around, political unrest, and the uncertainty of so much ahead will make our post-COVID world, feel like it’s not like the one we were promised, or at least told ourselves we would get, after surviving a pandemic.
We (the people) are in power. We’ll continue to see people leave jobs, change behaviours, ask of things differently (aka. hybrid world of in-person and virtual) and communicate in a different way than how our world was and who we were before COVID. Those employers, brands and businesses who anticipate this, think about this and come up with creative solutions to address ‘us as new people’ will get ahead.
In better news to end our week, Kevin Costner aka. John Dutton, the patriarch of Yellowstone, will be coming to Calgary Stampede in July and thanks to both The Grower and Farmtario for featuring my recent thoughts around our greatest challenge ahead in Canadian agriculture and food.
