In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal and Chief Executive Officer Bryan Strawser discusses returning to the office in 2021 in a Post-COVID world, what role will remote work play?

As vaccines roll out around the world, we may finally be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel for the pandemic.  But when we are able to return to the office, will workers want to return?  Bryan discusses the role of remote work, distributed teams, and working from home in the new normal.

Topics discussed include remote & distributed work, rethinking return to the office strategies, the pros and cons of distributed teams, data from a recent survey from McKinsey on the subject, and more.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Blog Post:  COVID-19 Safety through the Holidays and Beyond

Blog Post: Engaging your remote workforce

Episode #94: Personal and family preparedness for Coronavirus

Episode #95: Lessons learned to date from the Coronavirus fight

Episode #96: Crisis leadership in the time of Coronavirus

Episode #97: Returning to the office in the age of COVID-19

Episode #106: Rethinking Business Continuity in the age of COVID-19

Episode Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. And hey, it’s February 2021 when I’m recording this episode. We’ve taken a little bit of a pause from the podcast. I think our last episode was in August 2020, and things just got really busy for us here at Bryghtpath. We’ve had to staff up, hire some new folks. I’m also a graduate student and came back to class and got really just embroiled in that second year of a master’s program, and yeah. But in any event, it’s February 2021 as we’re recording this. We’re going to be back to weekly episodes of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast moving forward. Glad all of you have stuck with us, and look forward to your feedback and thoughts, and comments along the way.

In this edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, I want to talk a little bit about returning to work in this new post-COVID era that we are hopefully embarking on, now that we have approved vaccines around the world. We’re starting to see mass vaccinations happen, even here in the United States. We’re starting to move forward on those vaccinations and hoping that this is us coming out of the tunnel into the light as we move forward.

And so one of the things I want to talk about is this idea of virtual work and how this is going to play a significant part in our future in the knowledge economy, for knowledge workers, for folks whose work really involves using the information and knowledge that’s at their fingertips and applying that knowledge through things like IT, through call center leadership, and all of these other roles that are out there where you are able to work from home, where you don’t have

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses how business continuity strategy should be rethought in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

How are executives thinking about business continuity right now?  How did planning, or the lack of planning, impact the response of organizations around the world? What will the future of business continuity look like compared to the past decade?

Topics discussed include rethinking business continuity strategies, focusing on health as companies return to the office, governance practices, single points of failure, and more.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Episode #92: Novel Coronavirus

Episode #94: Personal and family preparedness for Coronavirus

Episode #95: Lessons learned to date from the Coronavirus fight

Episode #96: Crisis leadership in the time of Coronavirus

Episode #97: Returning to the office in the age of COVID-19

Blog Post:  How 3 companies have managed the COVID-19 pandemic

Blog Post:  What the COVID-19 pandemic will mean for the office of the future

Episode Transcript

Hello. And welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. And in today’s episode, I want to talk about the fact that the pandemic I think has proven to us that how we think about business continuity planning is wrong. And how we need to think about business continuity in the months and years to come has to be different. That it’s been heavily influenced by what we’ve experienced during the COVID-19 global pandemic and how this reshapes the way that executives and your boards of directors are thinking about business continuity right now, even if they haven’t articulated this to you yet.

I believe as we have moved through the pandemic, now we’re five months in if you’re in North America and farther in if you’re in Europe, Africa, the Middle East or Asia, where you’ve been experiencing this longer, there’s no way to think of this other than this has been a serious disruption from COVID and that has had a material and significant impact on our workforce and on our businesses worldwide. And I’m beginning to see an awakening amongst the business and technology leaders around the idea of business continuity.

And if you think about it, this has to be true. Because the pandemic itself has exposed significant gaps in how we think about bus

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser talks about how to take care of yourself through a major crisis – such as the COVID-19 pandemic that we’re all engaged in working to manage.

Topics discussed include self-care, taking immediate action where warranted, going to “the basement”, where to go for help, how stress manifests itself, and coping mechanisms for stress.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Episode #37: Taking care of the team during a crisis

Episode #104: Supporting the team in a prolonged crisis

Blog Post:  How 3 companies have managed the COVID-19 pandemic

Blog Post:  10 Ways an effective crisis manager survives a crisis

Blog Post:  3 essentials for thriving in a crisis

Episode Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. And in today’s episode, I want to talk about how to cope with the stress of working through the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve had some previous episodes over the past five months where we’ve talked about how to help the team. How do you help your crisis team? How do you help your executives? How do you help your teamwork through the COVID-19 pandemic and all of the issues that have come up?

But this episode is different. I want to talk about how to cope with your own stress. How to work through the challenges that you’re facing as the business continuity, crisis management, resiliency, security leader in your organization? Or even just in your role as a member of your family, or as an individual and how you can work through that.

Each one of us is handling the stress of COVID-19 in our own way. And for some of us, we endure more stress than others. We process stress differently and that’s normal. Everyone handles challenging situations in different ways. And no two of us really process this alike, but certainly fear and anxiety with COVID play a pretty significant role in our mental health and how we think about what’s going on in the world right now.

And even today, and I’m recording this episode on July 22nd, 2020. I saw a post on social media from a friend of mine who is normally one of the most rock-solid, confident, carefree individuals who is in a great marriage with great children. Both of them are full time employed. Haven’t been impacted by this epidemic except in the area of stress and mental health.

And you know what I saw today, it concerned me a little bit and five months into this pandemic with no end in sight and changes continuing to happen in terms of mask mandates and not knowing what we’re going to do for school in the fall. Not knowing when we’ll be returning to the office in some environments, certainly has created a different level of s

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses strategies and tactics for supporting your crisis management team (and others) during a prolonged crisis such as we’ve seen with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Topics discussed include critical incident debriefings and counseling, managing stress, checking in with your team, stress management tactics, vacations and rest, compensation & benefits, and taking care of each other across the emergency management/crisis management community.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Episode #37: Taking care of the team during a crisis

Blog Post:  How 3 companies have managed the COVID-19 pandemic

Blog Post:  10 Ways an effective crisis manager survives a crisis

Blog Post:  3 essentials for thriving in a crisis

Episode Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath.

In this week’s episode, I want to talk about how to support your crisis team during a prolonged crisis. If you think about it right now, we’re fiveish months into the COVID-19 pandemic here in the United States.

And if you’re a crisis leader in another country, you may be seven, eight or nine months into this situation right now, likely without much of a break away from the pandemic, or at least that’s what I’ve been experiencing since about February or so when we started seeing cases or started having the buildup here within the United States.

For most of us, I think we’re deep into supporting our team. We’re having daily or multiple times a day and weekly crisis team calls, executive calls. We’re briefing executives. We’re talking to the board, or if you’re in my case, you’re advising clients and helping them be successful as they try and navigate through this crisis situation.

So the big question for this episode is how can you, as the crisis or business continuity leader, make sure that you’re taking care of your team throughout this prolonged crisis situation that we found ourselves in with COVID-19 and the pandemic. And complicating this, I think on top of the usual strain and challenges and emotions that we go through in a crisis, we’re dealing with a set of just unprecedented stresses. We’ve been teaching our kids because our kids haven’t been able to go to school. We’ve had to deal with childcare issues or a complete lack of childcare. We’ve been balancing the roles of parents and employees.

We’ve been balancing being a spouse and being an employee, and we’re dealing with this multitude of remote work and work from home issues that we’ve all had to work through ourselves, and with our teams, and with our partners and stakeholders.

So we have all these unusual stresses, and all of that is on top of what we’re dealing with as folks who work in crisis management. I thin

In this episode of Managing Uncertainty, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses the new ASIS/ANSI Workplace Violence and Active Assailant – Prevention, Intervention, and Response Standard. The newly revised and expanded standard provides an overview of policies, processes, and protocols that organizations can adopt to help identify, assess, respond to, and mitigate threatening or intimidating …

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser reviews steps that organizations should consider when managing high-risk terminations. Topics discussed include threat assessment, threat incident risk factors, threat severity levels, understanding what high-risk terminations look like, managing reductions in force, and the steps organizations should take in high-risk …

It’s our one-hundredth episode! In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser, we discuss a common employee comment about someone in the workplace they may find threatening, which is “But, they are weird!”. How can we evolve our assessment behind simply reporting that someone is “weird” and focus …

Hurricane Season 2020 is upon us! In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal and Chief Executive Bryan Strawser talks through personal, family, and business preparedness for this year’s hurricane season. Topics discussed include personal & family preparedness, DHS’s Ready Campaign, and actions that businesses should take to ensure they and their teams …

As states, counties, and cities begin to lift stay-at-home orders and companies begin to make plans to return to the office in the coming weeks and months, what social distancing considerations should organizations include in their planning?

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser walks through a number of social distancing considerations, including workstations, cubicles, meeting rooms, offices, walkways & hallways, and more.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Episode #92: Novel Coronavirus

Episode #94: Personal and family preparedness for Coronavirus

Episode #95: Lessons learned to date from the Coronavirus fight

Episode #96: Crisis leadership in the time of Coronavirus

Episode #97: Returning to the office in the age of COVID-19

Episode Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. I’m flying solo again today due to Minnesota stay at home and social distancing guidelines that we have in place, as I’m sure you are dealing with in your own workplace today, I hope that you are doing well. I want to spend just a little bit of time and talk about social distancing guidelines for businesses, as you start to think about reopening or returning to the office or other environment that you might work in, what social distancing and what PPE might look like, in this environment.

And so I want to talk through some things that we’ve been thinking about that we’ve been doing with other clients. And hopefully, this gives you some advice on how to implement these in your own business.

I’ll start by saying something we’ve said before, and that is that we have absolutely no idea what government is going to do what the government might require a view in order to return to the office. And you may see state by state, county, by county, city by city differences large and small in what those requirements are. But here are some things that we’ve seen put into place in businesses that have to be open right now. And things that we expect would be on your menu of things to consider, as you think about reopening in going back to the office, or reopening your small retail store or bakery or, you know, whatever your businesses. The first is that you really have to think about the entire structure that you have for your business and start thinking about it in terms of social distancing. And so I’ll start with something basic and that is like walking down the hallway or doing going down a walkway.

What we’ve seen be effective, what the CDC is recommending and critical infrastructure already is to create some kind of barrier or delineation that creates one-way l

Leaders at all levels are being challenged today by the multitude of business leadership issues arising from the Coronavirus epidemic. The challenges are significant – from how one takes care of their employees, to how to best communicate with your customers or clients, to how to stay on top of the situation from day to day.

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser talks about leading through the Coronavirus epidemic.  Topics discussed include crisis leadership, crisis management frameworks, crisis communications, customer communications, cross-functional business leadership, collaboration, emotional intelligence, and more.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Episode #44: Successful crisis characteristics

Episode #47: A crisis team is not an academic debating society

Episode #94: Personal and family preparedness for Coronavirus

Episode #95: Lessons learned to date from the Coronavirus fight

Blog Post: Making Decisions in the Midst of a Crisis

Episode Transcript

Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the managing uncertainty podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. I’m solo again today. And, I want to talk about leadership in a crisis, focusing on what’s going on with coronavirus. And, what this really means from a crisis leadership perspective.

I think, without a doubt, the coronavirus pandemic is a crisis unlike any other we’ve seen in recent times. I’ve been involved in crisis management since about 2000. So, 20 years now. And, in all of the different crisis situations, active shooter situations, homicides, pandemics, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other disasters that have happened, this is far beyond anything that I’ve ever seen before.

It’s certainly not a time where there’s a playbook that you can pull out and say, “Well, here’s what we should do.” Down to every step. Those days are really behind us now. Leaders facing this crisis today, crisis leaders, business leaders, who may not have a lot of experience in crisis management are really facing a significant amount of uncertainty and really just sheer unpredictability at this point as this crisis unfolds.

I mean, look at some of the challenges that business leaders are faced with right now. There’s a fearful workforce. We’re looking at a really shaky economic foundation. We have a customer and consumer marketplace that’s bordering on panic. I mean, for God’s sake, people are buying out all the toilet paper that’s out there. And, we don’t know what steps the government may choose to take tomorrow in order to address the crisis that’s in front of them or that is headed at them in the coming days.