What have we learned during the covid lockdown?

I am sure most of us have paused to give this question some thought.

2020 is a year to remember. Not because it has marked the beginning of the new decade, the two 20s one next to the other promising a spectacular new start to the most optimistic among us.

But obviously because of the pandemic and the lockdown, experienced almost across the world. 

It has not been without cost that Greece has been featuring as a case study or an example of successful management of the covid crisis across the world. By cost, I do not mean the obvious economic or societal implications that we are beginning to witness here and across the world, and in fact we are quite unsure of, at a local and international level. By cost I mean mostly cost on a personal level, psychological level, as well as professional level.

Being a mom of two kids, aged 6 and 9, and a professional at the same time, my well-organized routine everyday life fell apart in a matter of days. I could not have seen that coming, or have prepared for it in any way. With schools shut down for a period of two and a half months, amidst a very busy spring, with people being under restriction of movement and essentially zero activity allowed outside the house, myself and many other women out there have had to take upon new roles, and obviously the boundaries inside the household became very flexible, to put in nicely.

All of a sudden, it was me, the mom, who was responsible for cooking, cleaning, entertaining the kids, following up on homeschooling and school assignments, doing the necessary shopping and house planning, while at the same time having to work from home and keep up a professional face and attitude towards my employer and also my colleagues and other partners. And deliver what the job required, for that matter. Obviously.

I cannot begin to count how many times I have had to shut down my audio and camera during an online meeting to avoid everyone having to listen my screaming kids at the background. Or how many hours the kids have spent in front of the screen, yes, acquiring new digital skills, at an impressive pace I must say, but also consuming unnecessary content that they shouldn’t have been exposed to in the first place.

So back to what I have learned. And what I am grateful for. Flexibility, resilience and adaptability seem to be top soft skills in today’s world, and those should be the qualities of a reciprocal relationship inside the family but also inside the professional environment. Although we are now officially back at the office, I still do work from home on occasions as in the family, we have decided against sending my kids to holiday camps or other outdoor activities organized locally this year. We reckon that adults may be able to respect safety measures to a certain extent, but young kids are not able to do that fully. So my kids continue to be at home for most of the day and only have the opportunity to spend the afternoons and early evenings outdoors, while we adults have the time to commit outside office hours. Not great fun for a kid, as you can imagine, but they are coping.

On a professional level, I am very fortunate to have an employer who understands the responsibility of being a professional and a mom at the same time. During these very challenging times, my employer and my colleagues as well have demonstrated remarkable flexibility, and trust, that I will continue to do my job and deliver even though I still need to break at some point to prepare lunch or start the washing machine while at home.

Technology has been a major challenge. How do we cope with all these new or not so new platforms, with different requirements in terms of infrastructure, different technology requirements in terms of skillsets and also a different set of rules in terms of what is considered secured or not secured within each organization? Technology remains a major challenge for all of us to this day, months after the lockdown, as we have been unable to find a platform that works across the board and respects different needs and requirements of different entities. I am thinking we need a lingua franca in technology, pretty much as we have adopted English as a lingua franca across the world.

Having said all the above, I would still like to keep some of the flexibility and adaptability in the office hours vs home office hours, and obviously some of the opportunities that online meetings offer to cut the unnecessary bla bla and get down to business in a more efficient way. Unfortunately this does not work for networking or matchmaking events, which we do a lot of at the Embassy level, or for the fostering of new partnerships, whereby getting to know the people one would like to work with and having that coffee or drink after the work is done is irreplaceable.

Well, the famous Greek summer is already hitting us here in Athens with the first heat wave happening as I am typing this text. The government continues to work hard to try to encourage tourists to visit Greece this summer, while also taking into some sort of consideration the situation in each country. For example, direct flights from the UK and Sweden are still not allowed, while the country has officially opened up all local airports as of yesterday. We shall have to wait and see what the consequences of this policy is, rescuing the tourist season vs the risk of having to suffer a new wave of covid and maybe yet a new lockdown in the fall. We will know pretty soon.