Vaccines won’t end the pandemic wrote Matthew Conlen, Denise Lu and James Glanz in the New York Times. “Vaccines alone are not enough, the (new Columbia University) model shows. And if precautions like working remotely, limiting travel and wearing masks are relaxed too soon, it could mean millions more infections and thousands more deaths.”

“There are people who are going to want to relax the controls we have in place,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia. “If we start thinking, ‘We’ve got a vaccine, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, we can stop in a couple of months’ — that’s way too soon.”

The longer the pandemic stretches on, the more reason to rethink how your organization operates as well as how your employees, customers and partners interact. It is tempting to focus mostly on when enough of us get vaccinated, but mask wearing and social distancing is likely to persist for longer than most of us like to think.

So what happens after the vaccine gets to everyone willing to take it? And will that time be measured in months (unlikely) or years?

Work from home isn’t a complete answer. Nor is Zoom. Neither is asking employees to tough it out a bit longer.

The housing market is already demonstrating that people are making long-term decisions to relocate to parts of the country they view as safer and more conducive to WFH. How long-term is your leadership team thinking?

I can’t begin to tell you what happens to businesses and society after the vaccines get widely distributed, but I would like to suggest that this is probably a good time to take a calmer, longer-term look at what happens after what happens next. From time to time in the months to come, I’ll be sharing the best thinking in this regard that crosses my path.