It’s been awhile since I posted because this has been a strange year. On one side, the pandemic situation has completely upended the industry I work in. On the other, there’s professional things going on that tie right back in and make it a challenge to think through as well. Because I try to keep this blog and that world separate, it meant stepping back.
But that distance has given me some new perspective. Everyone can acknowledge that things have changed a lot since March 2020. What most of us miss is that things have actually changed more than we think. Any given month, the rate of change has felt controlled and manageable. What has really happened though is that there has been constant, global, cross-industry, cross-function change happening EVERY MONTH FOR 15 MONTHS. In real estate, this is equivalent to about a decade worth of normal change. Projects we considered 12 months ago look silly and terrible now, but it’s not always clear why.
Apple recently put out a work from home direction that they thought was extremely generous. Basically they said, “Look everyone, we’ve never let you work from home before, so now we will let you work from home 40% of the time! Aren’t we so generous and kind?” I can picture the leadership discussions that led to this decision fairly clearly in my mind where there were lots of kudos and congratulations at how lenient and employee friendly they all were. Then, completely unsurprisingly to most of the world, their employees laughed and sent them a stern letter telling them how silly they were being. “So, we’ve proven we can work completely flexibly for the last 15 months while still bringing in the profits and turning out new products, and you are going to tell us that you can’t trust us to not be in the office most of the week? This is a complete erosion of the trust we thought we had built and now we see that you just think of us as drones.”
The world has shifted under our feet and we didn’t even realize it.
What happened to Apple can happen to all of us if we don’t stop to take deep breaths and think through what is going on around us. This is not just some business impact event. This pandemic has been deeply personal. It has forced us to understand the intense connections between our work and personal lives in a way that most of us had never really examined. But when we flip back into work mode, our minds can forget to realize that everyone we are working with is in the same boat as us regardless of seniority, geography, role, age, gender, etc. Habits die hard and some cause conflict with reality these days.