What’s the biggest thing you learned during this crisis? This is a pretty relevant question right now. If you can identify and appreciate the opportunities for growth that come during hard times, then the time will never be wasted or lost. In other words, you'll 'win'. In my last blog, I talked about what I’ve been learning about maintaining your emotional health during a crisis. I think we’re all a bit more self-reflective these days. From a business perspective, one of the surprising things I learned was how quickly we adapted to working from home and using the proper technology to accomplish that.

Prior to Covid, we created a committee to research new project management software. A team looked into potential software, got input from others, adhered to budget constraints, and over several months began presenting ideas to leadership. We also did a test run with the new software working closely with their advisors. This had been going on for about six months. Then Covid hit and we all went home.

We immediately shifted to Microsoft Teams (a communication platform that incorporates Outlook) to communicate, store information, set up projects, and much more. We had also been experimenting with software to store what we call our ‘knowledge database’. For adopting two ‘new to us’ systems, it was remarkable how quickly and easily we were all able to jump in and use both of these new programs. There were some mistakes in the learning, but overall, it was really smooth.

I’ve heard many other stories like this. For instance, I was recently listening to a Freakanomics podcast and they highlighted how telehealth changed dramatically during this time, for the better. Prior to Covid, there were so many regulations and protocols that it could never get off the ground in a consistent way. Normally, it would have taken years of legislative finagling to get this done. During Covid, things were relaxed and we got something most of us had been wanting for a while. It seems like we will have telehealth going forward.

I look back at our struggle to adopt new software and wonder, do I need to create a crisis to get things done in an expedient manner? On the other hand, there are issues with the software, like naming protocols, where do you save what, when do we use what, etc. We are slowly adding more structure to all of this.

I think the structure we had in place as a company helped us adapt to working at home pretty quickly. For instance, we already had a structure of deadlines, measuring productivity, status updates and check-ins. We have a system that measures results. Therefore, in an office environment, it’s not about who comes in early and stays late, it’s about the value you provide in your job, and we know how to measure that. This allowed us to adapt to the change of working at home successfully.

I think the lesson learned for us is that just jumping in and trying something new helps us cut through the red-tape and get to our goal of implementation faster. This season has forced us to forge ahead, ready or not, and sometimes that is a good thing.

What have you learned about your work processes, habits, or structure during this time?