Resist the Rush

At some point, the Coronavirus crisis will be over. Social distancing will be a thing of the past. Group meetings will be pronounced safe. Businesses will reopen. Most people will be happy and anxious to get back to work. Learning and development activities will begin, once again, to ramp up. Hold on. Just as we stop those who rush out of the room after a class before taking the time to complete the program evaluation form or post-test, it’s important to push back against the urge to quickly get back to business as usual.

It’s quite possible the organization may have been permanently changed by this crisis—so returning to ways of old may not be possible. Perhaps, a key customer or supplier is no longer in business or most teams have adopted new work practices, such as videoconferencing.

As organizations return to work, they will need to evaluate what worked and what did not, because there will be another crisis in the future—it may not be health-related and it may not be of the same scale, but it will need to be addressed so the organization is better prepared to meet its challenges.

Call it an assessment, an evaluation or an after-action review, but organizational development (OD) and training professionals can be positive influence leaders by encouraging people to think out of the box and resist conventional ways of doing things. These positive influence leaders can guide teams at all levels of the organization with key questions coupled with a positive process designed to facilitate the development of a proactive plan for the future.

Key Review Questions:

• What was our goal during the time/What did we hope to achieve?
• What actually happened/What did we do?
• What changed over the course of time?
• What worked well? What didn’t work well/What could have gone better?
• What should we do differently next time?
• What are some key lessons learned that can be applied in future crisis situations?
• What things worked well during this time that we should incorporate in the way we work in the future?
• What personal lessons did you learn from this experience?

Key Process Elements

Preparation:

• Set a time limit for the session (e.g., two hours or half-day)
• Prepare questions in advance for display in the room.
• The questions also may be sent to the participants in advance of the session.
• Consider using a scribe to take notes on the conclusions and recommendations.

Meeting Facilitation:

• Use a professional OD or training facilitator to manage the process.
• The facilitator should use open-ended questions to engage the participants.
• If participation is limited to a few people, encourage each person to share, at a minimum, one thing that worked and one that did not.

Summary and Recommendations:

• Ensure that you leave enough time to summarize the conclusions and action items for the future.
• Focus the conclusions on specific actionable recommendations, e.g., “at the beginning set up an organization-wide coordination committee.”
• Ask for feedback on the value of the review experience.
• Thank everyone for their participation.
• Send everyone a meeting summary.

As a crisis comes to an end, training and OD professionals can be positive influence leaders, by helping organizations learn from the experience and develop strategies for coping with similar challenges that may arise in the future, as well as integrating learnings from the experience into the near-term workplace.

Glenn Parker is a teambuilding and organizational development consultant and the co-author of “Positive Influence: The Leader Who Helps People Become Their Best Self” (HRD Press, 2020). The book is available now for pre-publication order on Amazon. For more information, visit: www.thepositiveinfluenceleader.com