5 Things We Actually Learned in 2020

If your company is anything like Holistic, this year has been one for the ages. I’ve been saying that this is the busiest month of the worst year in the history of humanity. As such, you can make an argument that these last few days have been the most challenging in the history of modern work. Am I exaggerating? Maybe a little, but I think everybody would agree that this has been a brutally tough year and that as we close things out, we are all really trying to put 2020 into a box that we never open again. But there are also a lot of opportunities to think about the future.

We’ve all learned a lot from the trauma impacting our lives, both from coronavirus as well as the ongoing national and global racial reckoning. So, I put together a list of five things that we learned in 2020 that we shouldn’t forget as we move to 2021 and beyond.

We learned that work from home works.

Work from home works. I say this as somebody who, on January 1, 2020, was not really a believer in the concept of work from home. I, like many, felt that it was impractical, that it was correlated with a lack of productivity, and that it would never work on a large scale basis. I, like many, was wrong. 

Work from home works. People have demonstrated an unbelievable capacity to be productive and successful in this environment, and they were able to do it with basically no preparation. I believe that productivity has increased -- dramatically so -- in this environment. As we look to the future and we think about sustainable solutions and how we’re going to do this long-term, the opportunity to continue to refine what we’re doing to improve upon it is there. But work from home is here to stay. Sure, on some level, we will return to the office in one fashion or another. I don’t doubt that, but work from home is going to have a much bigger role to play in everybody’s working structure and we need to be prepared for that.

We learned that balance is more important than we thought and more elusive than we imagined.

Who would’ve thought that you could eliminate two hours of commuting a day and be around your family all the time and feel less balanced than you were before? Balance has become this crazy important thing and we have finally realized that things like shutting down, taking time off, going on vacation, having happy hours and social interactions, and generally detaching from the constant twang of your email and doorknocking of your Slack channel are critical for our mental health and overall chance of being successful in our jobs.

This year has been an extreme regression in terms of balance for many, and it’s not like we were all slaying on this before. Not changing out of your pajamas when you go to work sort-of makes you feel like everything is the same. You can pretty quickly end up in a scenario where you stop seeing the edge between the end of the workday and the start of your home time or stop feeling the need to turn off your phone on the weekend, etc. Sometime in the future, when we return to the new normal in terms of life, this will be tested. We must remember that balance is critical, and we should continue to embrace that idea when we return to life with more options. 

We learned that race is an issue that we have to deal with now, and we have to deal with it consistently, and we can’t avoid it anymore.

160 years after the Civil War the country had a national racial reckoning this year, where a lot of people looked in the mirror and a lot of companies stepped up to the plate to acknowledge something that we should have acknowledged along time ago, which is systemic inequity in this country, particularly focused on Black Americans, fueled by centuries of discrimination, unfairness, racism, bigotry, and outright pain. This year, we came to the table and learned something. We didn’t learn about the challenges, because the challenges have existed for centuries and we’ve just been ignoring them. What we learned is that we must acknowledge them and we must face them head-on and that they are all of our responsibility to overcome. And what we learned is that you can’t solve a centuries-old systemic inequity with a tweet or a Facebook post or an all-staff email. This is ongoing work that’s going to require resources and energy and tough conversations and self-examination. This work is necessary-it’s fundamental for the success of our companies, our business community, our individual lives, our republic.

We learned that people are more important than ever.

At Holistic we were saying that people are more important than ever before the global pandemic. What we truly learned is that our people are everything. We can trust them, we rely on them in ways that we never knew, we predicted our whole business success on the talent that we were able to assemble, and our commitment to them and our ability to be there for them is the only thing that is determining our long-term success or failure. In 2021, we expect this to continue. We expect companies to continue to look at new and creative ways to be there for their employees, to provide them opportunities to grow and be creative, and to generally support their success at work and in life. Human capital in the information age is everything.

Finally, we learned we have a lot to be thankful for.

March 12th was one of the most terrifying days I've ever experienced as an adult. That was the day that the president addressed the nation about the coronavirus, the NBA shut down, Tom Hanks got Covid; it was the day that everything became real, and it became very evident that we were going to have to confront coronavirus in a way that we hadn’t really realized. My sense at that point in time was that everything was over. Businesses, individual hopes and aspirations, people's health, it was all going to go down the tubes. And it has been a truly, incredibly traumatic year, 300,000 people have died already in the United States from this tragedy. Each of these people has a family and a history and a birthday; a future and a past and hopes and aspirations and dreams that won’t be realized. Millions of more people have lost jobs, been unable to attend school, missed out on life opportunities like graduations and proms and weddings; the pain that we’ve experienced individually and collectively will never be forgotten or overcome, and it shouldn’t be. What it should be is a reminder for all of us about how grateful we can be and how important of a role that gratitude should continue to play in all of our lives; at work, at home, everywhere. We learned that every day is truly a blessing, every time we get to get up and go to work to pursue opportunities and build our families and our futures, we’ve been given a gift, a gift that is denied to many of us, unfairly. It’s a gift for which we should be grateful consistently. So, as we start to ease back into some semblance of normal life, my primary hope for 2021 is that we remember that we have a lot to be thankful for, and as we pursue our collective vision for our companies or ourselves that we're really thoughtful about the role of gratitude and the role of optimism in all that we do.

Happy holidays from Holistic. It’s been a year. We’re hopeful that the future will be bright, and we appreciate you all.