4 lessons the pandemic taught us about work, life, and balance.

What is the missing word.

This is your team. And we've also learned that that separation between family and work has become this balancing act. And that when we used to say, "Well, this is my work ____ and this is my family ____, and those are two completely different things," for many of us, it's exactly the same thing. You're no longer at ____ and at work.

Find the missing word.

For many of us, work is at home and the home is. and ____ confusing, and ____ creating a whole different level of complexity and coordination so that we understand that ____ easier actually to work when we can separate the work that we do as a team from the work that we do in our family.

Find the missing word.

And as we move through the organization, _________ sort of gets a little dumbed down and the rules get a lot stricter, and we have to have more control. And the truth is, everybody's a grown-up, we can see it now. _________ has all of these things to figure out and coordinate. And so now we're expecting from people adult behaviour. We're now focusing on the results that matter, not the work. And the way we track it now is we don't walk by and see who's working. We pay attention to what people are doing. And I think that that's always been the best metric.

Find the missing word.

And you know what? For the first time in my life, the concept of best practices is out the window. And you know what? We don't care what Google's doing because we're not Google. We don't care what some other company is doing. Nobody's doing it best. We're all ________ it out as we go along and we're ________ it out for our organizations in our teams at this time. So in order for people to deliver the right results, in order for people's hard work to matter, it has to be in the context of what success looks like for your organization.

Find the missing words.

So, if we start to think about context, it's really important that we think about how we teach that. If we can teach everybody in the company how to read a ______ and ____ statement, if we can teach them what the different teams do, and what they're setting out to accomplish, then people within their own small teams, and within themselves, can figure out what excellence looks like for them. And so, then we can start operating relatively independently as a whole organization because we're all moving in the same direction, trying to do the same thing.

Find the missing word.

And there's a really critically important part of making that work, and that's communication. And everything about communication has changed. We tend to think that communication is this waterfall from the top to the bottom. The executives would tell ________, and the next level would tell ________, and we'd go all the way down to the shop floor and everybody would understand what's going on. Well, it may not have worked that well then, but it certainly doesn't work that well now.

Find the missing word

So now we have to recognize it's a different heartbeat. What has it been before and what should it be now? How do we make sure that the messages are clear and consistent? Because that's how people operate. That's how those adults who get the freedom and the responsibility to produce great results operate best is when they understand what they need to know in order to make the best decisions. So that

Find the missing word.

One of the things we have to do is think about what the right discipline is for that. If you used to communicate to your team __ walking __ and asking how they're doing or if they had heard something, you're going to have to schedule that now, it's going to have to have discipline. We've got to check in with the people on the shop floor to make sure they're hearing what they need to hear because it's not going to automatically happen.

Find the missing word.

One of the ideas I have is just jot down at the end of every day a sentence of what worked and what didn't work. And you don't have to look at it for a month. But when you look back, over a month, you want to look for, "Wow, that was surprising. I didn’t really think that would be as effective as it is.” Or maybe it would be, like, "We keep trying to have this in-person meeting in

Find the missing words.

So now I'm starting to hear a lot of nostalgia around the way it used to be. There are things we aren't doing now that don't matter. Maybe we don't need to go back for five levels of approval. Maybe we don't need to go back and do that ______ ___________ review. Maybe we don't need to do a whole bunch of things that were part of the way we do business that just aren't making a difference.

Find the missing word.

You know what? The way we used to do it not only is not the way of the future, but we're discovering so many wonderful things right now. Let's not lose it. We want to create a new organization, new

Find the missing word.

One of the most important things that we can do is realize the things that we aren't doing now. The stuff that we've stopped doing and not go back and do it again. ____ if we don't go back? ____ if we go forward and rethink the way we work?