“Everywhere I look, I see examples of pandemic drift. Onboarding is a pale shadow of how we used to bring new talent into our fold. We visit customers perhaps 30% as often as we once did. There are large chunks of our team members I’ve never seen in person, and thus our relationships are far more superficial.”

For purposes of confidentiality, I’m paraphrasing what multiple leaders have told me and am sharing them today in the voice of a single fictional but plausible CEO.

“We’re getting things done and hitting our targets, but I worry we have lost a step. What insights are we missing because we spend far less time with our clients? What opportunities do we not even suspect are there for the grasping, if we were able to spot them?

“It feels like we are executing—and adapting—well, but we have accepted a performance level that lives south of our true potential.”

My own observation is that pandemic drift is often manifesting in four key areas:

●      Talent development

●      Onboarding

●      Building a sense of community

●      Customer relationships

These are portions of your business in which personal relationships and face-to-face interactions especially matter. They can be negatively impacted not only by shifts in your own teams’ actions, but also by societal shifts that are making us all a bit less social. To cite a quick example of this, nearly everyone I know reports that their social life is less social than it was pre pandemic.

As a friend of a friend recently observed, “Maybe we all got used to being less social?”

Here are a few questions you might ask of your company and your key players:

●      What are the things you lost or have let go of?

●      Have you lost rigor or discipline in key areas of your business?

●      Have you allowed apathy and/or a lack of initiative to creep in?

●      How can you rekindle deeper and more productive relationships?

●      Can you increase the cadence of face-to-face (or just deeper) interactions?

If you used to have development conversations quarterly, but now they have drifted into a pace of once or twice a year, can you shift back to the old cadence?

If you remain committed to leaning heavily on remote business tools, can you develop new processes and habits that strengthen—rather than weaken—your performance levels in the four vulnerable areas I mentioned?

Pandemic drift is a real thing, made possible by overlapping changes in our society, organization and marketplace. It’s one of those things that you can easily miss, but once you start looking for it, you will likely see it in more places than you expect.