Like It or Not, Re-Entry Is Here

When you consider re-entry for yourself and your company, do you jump for joy or want to buy a private island and become a hermit?

Thankfully it seems like the COVID tide is turning, and more and more people are being vaccinated, paving the way to re-introduce in-person connection. Along with the vaccine comes what appears to be an assumption that everyone’s ecstatic about re-entry — that everyone should start booking their calendars with retreats, meetings, coffees, vacations, parties and all the other things that turned off like a light switch in early 2020.

And some people are ecstatic at the prospect. But more and more, I’m hearing about leaders that are wishing we could just keep things as they’ve been the past year, but without the masks, pandemic and deaths. There are a lot of variations on the theme of why:

• Some are simply introverts that have loved having so much time alone to re-energize (and they’ve realized how much society is biased towards thinking that extroverts define “normal”).
• Some have finally created healthy self-care routines, and they’re worried they’ll lose them if being in an office every day becomes the norm again.
• Some have finally figured out how to balance (too much) work with life, and the prospect of factoring back in tons of meetings and driving is…