500-day journey to the new normal at work

I hope all of you are safe and secure, wherever you are working or sheltering. With our persistent joint efforts and with all the help we can get, we will get through the coronavirus crisis. When will America's workplaces return to normal? My short answer is, we will never return to the normal we remember, but with a lot of effort, we should reach a new stasis in 2022. One thing is certain: The workplace in 2022 will look far different than it did two months ago.

Over the next 18 immensely important months, all of us will face short-term crises that will lead us to the new employment reality. Of course, we need to have a strategy to take us through the next year and a half, but we also need a vision of where we hope to be heading

'The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry'

That axiom by Scottish poet Robert Burns has never rung truer. We've all sat through dozens of long-range planning programs and disaster preparedness sessions without ever coming close to imagining the circumstances we're seeing today. We've endured programs in which we were asked to anticipate and train for disruptive technologies and the new skill sets some employees would need, but nothing approaching the current situation was ever put on the board.