Even before COVID-19, a lot of our staff worked remotely. Where we gather is typically not at our offices but at client sites, and that’s where a lot of the camaraderie and personal development happens, since we’re there often. I frequently travel cross-country, with clients in Corvallis, Ore.; Walnut Creek, Calif.; Portland, Maine; Tampa, Fla.; and Nashville, Tenn. In March, I was in California when United Health Group decided to pull everybody off the road.
Now, we’ve been able to do things remotely using tools like Zoom, including a design session in late June that had 35 people and lasted seven and a half hours. Before COVID-19, I would have told you unequivocally that this was impossible. As we’ve learned how to work this way, we’ve started to understand that it will change the way we work going forward. I think the other lesson is that people have really connected in a very personal way to their families. Going forward, we need to make sure that is respected and allow people to set boundaries that are important to them.
Up until this point, one of my biggest challenges as a practice leader has been retaining people who are young parents, both women and men. The travel puts a lot of pressure on their home lives, so if we can achieve better work-life harmony, we will be able to improve recruitment and retention overall. Balance is important, too, especially for our younger staff. Right now, they aren’t getting the opportunity to be at client sites and learn from watching the more senior members of the team. I am seeing the emotional effects from this pandemic stratify more generationally, even among the traditionally high-performing individuals who are attracted to consulting careers.
Individual experiences also are affecting how people are reacting to the current situation. I noticed early on that regional differences across the country were creating tensions in the group, which surprised me. It’s important for leaders to think about the leadership shadow that they are leaving on others, and people’s polarized experiences to the pandemic are producing a set of unconscious biases, which can lead to a lack of empathy. We need to be more conscious of recognizing and addressing our emotional reactions during this time.
Today, we’re slowly going back to our office in Nashville and acclimating to life in a COVID-19 environment. We are adapting both our clients and our internal practice work to the reality that we are going to be remote for quite some time. To me, the closest event to the kind of crisis that we’re currently facing is 9/11. During that time, we reconnected in a more emotional way to each other and our families—and it had a similar impact on travel albeit with a much shorter duration. The difference is that as this goes on, I’m seeing more strain because people so desperately want to get back to a more normal way of life.
Michele Molden, FACHE, is practice lead, Provider Enterprise Services, Optum Advisory Services, Eden Prairie, Minn. (moldenm@optum.com).