My colleague Camille Antonetti recently shared that her word to describe 2020 was ‘adaptability’, which got me thinking about the word that sums up 2020 for me. Connected is my word. Given many of us have been working from home and social distancing since March, connected may not be the word that comes to mind for some. With the pandemic as the backdrop, we have all had to put extra thought and effort into how to stay connected.
Much of our work on Customer Advisory Boards has shifted from in-person to online during the course of the year; but for a number of Boards, we have always conducted virtual meetings in between the face-to-face interactions. These virtual connection points have served to continue the conversations and help keep our clients and their customers connected with each other and progressing company strategies in between physical meetings.
Virtual interactions may never replace the sidebar conversations that happen during the in-person coffee breaks, but for customer advisory board members, the virtual meetings have enabled them to share the challenges they are going through in their organizations and they often find comfort in knowing they are not alone in what they are grappling with.
I hope my word for 2021 remains the same – connected, but that we all get to connect across the board table in addition to across the computer screens.