Tomorrow is here already

By Choi Jung-min, Kim Jong-nam

The coronavirus is still rampant worldwide, causing widespread suffering. In some of the countries that are recovering, leaders are announcing their plans for the post-coronavirus future. Since COVID-19 has given organizations and individuals a lot to learn from, it will be worthwhile to think about how corporations must now adapt to the future.

The coronavirus gave us the opportunity to truly reflect on the big question of whether what we had been doing organization-wide was effective. Now that many corporations have moved to virtual work, many employees and leaders are questioning whether the old ways of doing things made sense in the first place. Is the existing order in the organization as necessary as it was? Is interpersonal relationship management in the organization helpful for work performance? Since many pundits say that it is unimaginable to go back to "business as usual," we need to embrace the new tomorrow that has already arrived.

The coronavirus also led us to question whether the existing systems of people management were indeed the best way to successfully manage an organization. Many leaders were unprepared to deal with such a disruption and felt helpless, forcing employees to be, ironically, the ones to show leadership. Leaders did not seem to know how to look at the entire situation and use it to come up with organization-wide measures. Many leaders are still in doubt about how to motivate their employees, how to communicate the most important information, and how to manage the psychology of their entire staff in these difficult times.

That is not all. The coronavirus pandemic required companies to experiment with things that seemed impossible in the past. It turned out that virtual work was possible, as was virtual training, and even leadership from working-level staff. Almost everything that was deemed impossible to be done online proved not to be so. Like Lamarck's theory of use and disuse in biology, people and organizations learned that they had other "muscles" than the ones they normally used: these muscles only needed to be developed.

In the meantime, corporations need to think about several management issues. First, they must consider whether their current way of working is optimal or if it needs to be fixed or refined. Now that organizations have already figured out what truly can and cannot be done virtually, they must use this opportunity to think about what a desirable virtual culture could look like. We need to be prepared for the possibility that this type of pandemic will come more frequently. We must also keep the lesson in mind that, as we have experienced, corporations cannot be successful without being prepared for unfamiliar situations, no matter what adaptations these situations require. These days, a successful corporation has a culture in which unprecedented ways of working can flourish. Corporations must also keep in mind that employees are looking around to see which companies are showing true leadership.

Second, if this crisis has revealed that the leadership needs deep surgery, we need to lay it on the operating table. Organizations with leadership styles that emphasized face-to-face contact, interpersonal relationships, amount of visible labor rather than deep engagement, and rank-and-position-centered management should be seriously examining themselves. In addition, leaders need to pay more vigilant attention to whether their sensitivity and responsiveness to this crisis is as sharp as it needs to be, both for now and future. If leadership is not able to change the organization's essence, its very future is under threat.

Last but not least, micro-risk management is now more significant because when an organization goes through a drastic and major change, its attention to detail brings about much more powerful effects than one might expect. We are not talking about contingency plans only. We are talking about the novel management of strategy and culture: person-optimized working environments, close recognition of remote employees, making the right calls to reassure nervous stakeholders, welcoming attitudes toward online work, appropriate levels of security maintenance, newly required competencies, etc.

Organizations' abilities to change are essential to designing their futures. As evolutionary theory suggests, organizations can keep moving forward only if they can grow the muscles that they will need in our new future which already has come.

Choi Jung-min is in charge of HR at KDB Life insurance, which is a subsidiary of KDB Bank. Kim Jong-nam is the founding CEO of META (www.imeta.co.kr). He works as an organizational development consultant globally.

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