Page 87 - FDCC Pandemic Book

Living in a Pandemic: A Collection of Stories on Coping, Resilience & Hope
and even the expertise of certain individuals within departments. It seems that when the breadth of knowledge needed to know when, how, and whether to communicate is high, reliance on technology to facilitate that communication becomes significantly more difficult.
If I were in Kemper’s Phoenix offices in 2019, the culture of communicating within the company would have been an afterthought. By being forced to develop so many new professional relationships remotely, I have grown a new appreciation for certain less tangible aspects of professional communication.
This chapter wouldn’t be complete without a nod to certain other novel COVID- related challenges that made my transition significantly more difficult. Some of these challenges are almost cliché at this point, such as how to handle multiple competing video-conference calls when your spouse shares “office space,” how to prevent an overly protective dog from aggressively interrupting an important call and/or my daughter’s rigorously-imposed sleep schedule, or how to make sure a toddler is entertained and cared for without exposing the family to COVID. I now also have experience handling less common age-of-COVID challenges, such as what to do when your food delivery driver hops a curb and destroys the cable box supplying internet to you and your neighbors, or how to handle a close neighbor transitioning a home in an otherwise quiet neighborhood to a full-time VRBO party house.
Despite all the challenges we’ve faced, I am incredibly lucky that my professional life remains stable, and that I have the luxury of writing about the lessons learned from a recent job change. At the very least, I hope to be able to hold onto the lessons of 2020 when the world regains a sense of normalcy.
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