What does your business look like after COVID?

Now that we have a been through an entire year of COVID, lockdowns, quarantines, and gathering restrictions how did your business fare?  Were you able to make a pivot and adjust so you could keep your business going?  I remember thinking that this would be a couple of weeks and then back to normal. 

We had been planning a big family vacation.  Plane tickets had been purchased, our housing was arranged, and reservations paid in full for several tourist excursions.  Even 6 weeks into this new world of COVID we were hoping it would let up in the “near future.”  So repeatedly we extended our reservations, but ultimately by mid-summer were resigned to the fact that this was not going away, and we cancelled everything, getting back what we could from the pre-paid plans. (The travel industry was hit particularly hard.)  And here we are still dealing with the same travel concerns a year later even with vaccines well underway.  I do believe that there is light at the end of this long tunnel, but I think the new normal may look different.   

Much of what I do can be done remotely or via Zoom, but there are some things that I’m just used to doing in person and it was difficult to make that shift especially when neither clients nor I were completely comfortable with in-person gatherings.  Zoom was better than phone, but there is something lost with meeting something in-person.  Handshakes may be a thing of the past.  Still trying to get used to elbow bumps, it just feels weird and too casual to me.

For many managers making a pivot from supervising staff in-person vs. remotely became the biggest challenge.  If not already adept at that skill, managers had to learn on the fly how to gauge productivity by output vs. actually seeing someone working at their workstation.  If you hired well initially, this would not be an issue.  Employees who feel valued for what they do will work well from home or in the office.

The question now is in the long term how will you run your business?  Some of the changes we were forced to make proved to be beneficial, other changes may have hurt your business.  What changes will you keep and what are you looking forward to being able to get back in place again?  How will your business thrive moving forward?