Five years ago this month, life as we knew it changed forever.
Knowledge workers went home almost overnight. We scoured the aisles of stores for surgical masks. We started scrubbing our vegetables.
If you’ve been following me since then, you may recall that my mom passed away in April of 2020. So one of my first Zooms was for my mom’s funeral.
And while this was one of the biggest crises the work force has ever faced, interestingly, in many ways workplaces were healthier then. Yep, employees in their work-mullets (business on top, sweatpants on the bottom) battling online school and their spouses 24-7 experienced higher engagement than we do now.
Perhaps you think that spike in engagement was just a matter of good old crisis bonding, but in looking at what’s happening at work today, I have a different idea.
As I see it, working from home over Zoom gave us a peek into each other’s worlds (we couldn’t look away if we tried!) and made us more comfortable with the mess of being human—and it worked for a lot of us. Leaders and employees felt more connected (to themselves and each other), more seen, and more heard.
I mean, cut to today when employee engagement is at an 11-year low, two-thirds of American employees report feeling burned out at work, CEOs and employees can’t stop arguing about how many days are the “right” amount of days in the office, and everyone is worried that AI will make all of our jobs obsolete anyway!
While I would never want to go back to March 2020, as a workplace strategist and a human, I don’t want to forget all of what I saw, heard, and felt.
And most of all, I don’t want to forget what I learned:
Great human leaders lead with the right amount of messy.
3/4/25
