Tribune. After sixteen months of the pandemic, companies are wondering about the aftermath, wondering if and how employees will want to return to the site, and if the collective will be able to resume its place. How can we distinguish what has definitely changed in the relationship to work from what, on the contrary, has only been a temporary adaptation? The vast majority of these questions are aimed at employees in their relationship to work, but not so much at management teams. Yet they too have made major adaptive efforts during this crisis and developed new ways of working. What lessons can they learn from it? What practices to keep for the post-Covid-19 period?
A detour through what management specialists call the “Extreme contexts” can be enlightening. Contexts are qualified as extreme when they combine uncertainty, permanent change and risk. Some organizations have been operating in these contexts for a long time, such as the military world, emergency relief professionals or nuclear power plants. They have developed a certain number of practices from which traditional companies, also confronted with increasingly extreme contexts, could draw inspiration from.
Two specific practices were also spontaneously developed by many companies during the crisis due to Covid-19.
Collective exercises
The first is the “feedback” (the “Retex”, in the jargon of managers). It consists of looking back on the way in which a situation was managed, on a collective and individual level, in order to learn from the mistakes and to keep the good practices that emerged spontaneously. This retrospective exercise makes it possible to review choices, decisions and behaviors, to analyze their relevance in order to identify those which should be retained and those which should not be repeated. This demanding collective exercise can be practiced immediately after the situation (we speak of “hot retex”) or later (we speak of “cold retex”). Beyond a discussion on what was done well or not, it allows an emotional sharing of the lived situation and gives a collective meaning to the individual experiences, however often divergent. Institutionalized in most organizations usually operating in extreme contexts, it was almost non-existent in the company before the pandemic. Often perceived as unproductive in managerial terms, this time for sharing and analysis was rarely freed up, the operational capturing the entire “bandwidth” of the management teams.
You have 54.98% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.