Old Classmate Effect

I got the title of this post for this week's "The Seen and the Unseen" podcast, where Abhijit Bhaduri talks about the post-pandemic effect on organisations with the host Amit Varma. Of course, we all know that feeling of meeting our school or college classmates after a few years. Until we meet and interact with them, we have their old image in our psyche. We are surprised or sometimes shocked not only by their physical get-up but more when we know about the things they have done, the life they are leading and who they are now.

Your office colleagues who went home in March 2020 will be back in front of you after more than two years. Of course, you would have interacted with a very few team members regularly, but that was limited visibility of limited people. So when you now meet them, it will be the "old classmate effect' with most of them. And the gap was not an ordinary time gap as it is typically in the case of classmates.

However, the last two years were anything but ordinary. Many have gone through personal trauma, breakdowns and loss. Some have reskilled themselves and learnt new hobbies that have changed them as a person. A few have realised new meanings for their life and have thus gone through personal transformation. And, you too have changed. So when you meet people from your organisation, it will be different chemistry in a very different world. When it comes to ways of working, you will see a massive difference in areas of productivity, accountability and autonomy. Many have learned to work without direct supervision and control. Many good managers in the old world have to adapt to the new workforce and workplace. Most of our organisational set-up, like educational set-up, was standardised. We assumed everyone to be productive between 9-5. Neuroscientist Matthew Walker in his book "Why we sleep?" Talks about how different people can be productive at different times in the day depending on whether they are "early birds" or "night owls". In the last two years, people adopted different time zones to complete work effectively with high productivity and creativity based on their natural patterns. All these new changes have to be acknowledged and understood. The wishfulness for an immediate return to the old normal is not only futile but can impact the productivity of the entire ecosystem. Organisations have to re-calibrate their vision for the new workplace and create an inclusive environment for the new workforce. Wishing your classmates to be as they were in your past is now just nostalgia. Life moves on.