Not that we have seen the end of Covid-19, no not yet. We will yet congratulate ourselves on that. In the meantime, there is life now and so also after. Lockdown is not your lockup so said my Pastor, Rev. Sam Aboyeji.
In my industry, the People Management space, Working From Home (WFH) is the new normal. We were not fully ready for it. We’ve been teaching and selling the ideas of flexi-hour and WFH for a long time. Not many organisations listened until now. It’s now upon us and we are implementing all kinds of variations of these laudable concepts. This is good. These are part of the positive lessons of the Covid-19 era.
My purpose here is to say emphatically that things will never be the same again post-Covid-19, at least in the way we hire, deploy, develop and manage people. As we speak, virtual classrooms, webinars and online conferences are going on across borders globally. Audiences that the ‘brick and mortar’ classroom could not capture or get to are now being connected, and learning is taking place. We would also have to find a way to integrate and perfect the process of the evaluation of learning transfer using the various models of RoI and RoE that we normally use in F2F settings especially the Kirkpatrick 4-Level Training Effectiveness Evaluation model.
Firms are perfecting and scaling up their virtual classroom architectures and learning management systems (LMS) to meet the new realities. Contents are being streamlined as new ones are being developed. Business continuity and survival strategies are being deployed. A colleague just sent me an invitation to join his team of virtual recruiters. The advantages are enormous. We are pulling resources. Faculty can now be located anywhere on the globe and joint-facilitation is seamless and so interactive. Nothing to be scared of. Learning is lifelong.
A few days ago, a friend and a younger colleague was just taking me through the rudiments of a virtual interactive classroom, presenting my slides just like in the brick and mortar classroom.
All hands are on deck. It’s no time to pass the buck or point fingers. No ‘blame-storming’ guys. We are all in this together.
Now, let me take a brisk risk taking a peep into one of my favourite industries, Aviation, the reason for the caption. I bless our great God for the opportunity He’s given me to travel far and near. It’s kind of mixed feeling for me, sad because of huge financial and job losses across industries and economies, but I’m so excited right now for a reason. I know also that I’m celebrating the obvious, or is it not obvious?
Just yesterday, for the first time in recent history (please pardon me, this is as far as I know now. I welcome a rejoinder, if any) a Nigerian airline, *Air Peace*, a chartered flight completed a direct flight to and from China. I have never been to China but I have regularly visited Australia since 2012 and it takes us two or three flights to get there. When using KLM, it’s three flights. For Qatar, Ethihad and Emirates, you need two flights from Lagos, and between 17 and 23 flight hours respectively. Direct flight to China would definitely be a thing of joy to Nigerians, rather than going through Ethiopia, Kenya or South Africa. So, after this siege (Covid-19) is past, *Air Peace* would be creative to add the China route to its bouquet of offerings. So, I say *congratulations* to those who frequent the China route and to Nigeria. There you are, as Zeburudaya would say, another positive fallout of this season. Things can never be the same again. It’s going to be business unusual.
We are remotely managing our workforce especially those in Lagos, Ogun and FCT. This is not new. We have been remotely managing our workers in some fringe states. A major thing you can’t do without is communication coupled with authentic information dissemination. Give your employees authentic information real time. Let them know that the only authentic information on Covid-19 comes from NCDC. Let them know scientifically that there’s no relationship between 5G and coronavirus. Send them encouraging history that about 100 years ago, there was a lockdown too, globally, and churches and mosques were closed. That time also passed.
If you are not many, you can hook up on Zoom, ‘FaceTime connectivity’, Google Meet, Microsoft, etc. You can have both audio and video sessions. WhatsApp and Telegram platforms can be created for information sharing. For sanity, instead of just setting platform rules that are wantonly and irreverently broken these days, just activate the “Admin Only can send message” to stop any post other than official information from Admin.
To be continued…
