The Habit Game - Learning and Unlearning
The day is coming when shelter-in-place orders will be a thing of the past. In NC, I’m counting today as day 36 of quarantine, as March 16th was the first day that public schools were closed. They're set to be closed until May 15th.
Many of us started with working from home as a novelty - we saw each other's work setups, animals, and children, and unfortunately, as we built our work-from-home muscles, we may have seen more about our coworkers than we were meant to. It's taken a while to get used to this scenario, and there are many in the same house who are struggling to share both the internet and the working space.
New habits take practice, and research has now shown that a habit doesn't just magically form in 21 days as many of us have been taught. It can take up to 2 months: https://jamesclear.com/new-habit. Therefore, many of us have yet to hit our stride with this work from home thing, and there’s talk about re-opening the economy, going back to work, etc. Just as habits take time to form, they also take time to unlearn. This video about the Backwards Brain Bicycle from the folks at Smarter Every Day illustrates this beautifully.
As you consider your employees and coming back to work, what will they need to retrain their brains for WFO (work from office)? Everyone will need some type of support, and there’s not a leader anywhere who has experienced this scenario before. Some questions to ponder:
What support will your experienced leaders need?
What support will your new leaders and managers need?
What common ground do they share that can help inspire employees as priorities and objectives are restructured?
