After the high-octane time of crisis…

As a consultant and a coach, I witnessed at close quarters the low point that was January and February 2021.  The cold, dark months of that brutal third UK lockdown were very hard to navigate but I think living at high octane crisis speed for nearly a year beforehand was the real risk factor.  Crises usually last a few weeks or months at most.  This one just kept going.  There was a fast pace to the new way of working, no time to think, no downtime - just a full-out sprint every day.  The home working experience was clearly not the same for everyone.  One child-free senior leader told me ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about, home working is great’ while another, a lone parent home schooling 2 primary aged children, told me they were barely hanging on. Others lost loved ones and lived in fear with underlying health conditions.  People need their vivid, life-changing and often very painful experience of the pandemic acknowledged and supported.  Crisis style working can’t become part of the new normal. Its unsustainable as well as undesirable.  People need time to pause and ponder or their performance and the organisation ultimately suffers. Summer holidays can’t come soon enough.

I have long been a fully signed up cheerleader for the HE sector and the last year has only impressed me more.  Hard work, speedy decision making, rapid change, clever innovation, student focus and frontline community and civic engagement.  It was all there in unprecedented ways - what might have taken 10 years in the old days was achieved in 2 weeks.  All hands were on deck and the sector surprised itself. And then of course there is the exemplary role played by the experts - the vaccine creators, the virologists, the epidemiologists, the social psychologists to name a few.  It seems we have not ‘had enough of experts’ after all.  Far from it, the experts are now heroes, front and centre.

No other institution is better placed to respond to the pandemic than the university.  As ever, they will help shape and rebuild society, they will build the sorts of future leaders we need to flourish in new times, they will facilitate social mobility.  But attention needs to be paid to the people who deliver those outcomes.  We need to acknowledge, celebrate and encourage our remarkable staff.