Finding Joy When It Looks so Bleak!

Business isn’t going so good. The news if full of Covid19. People are getting tired of being shut up in their houses. Money is tight. People who are used to being highly productive are watching reruns of Andy of Mayberry. What’s there to be joyful for?

As I write this, there have been 609,000+ confirmed cases of Covid19 in the US. If we figure we’ve only diagnosed a third of the actual cases, that would mean there have been 1,827,000+ people infected with the virus. That means 325,000,000 (approximately) people in the US have not gotten the virus so far! Yes, a lot of people have gotten sick, but a lot of us are as healthy as can be! It could get worse, if we don’t continue with “social distancing” and we stop our hygienic ways, but we can control the situation. If we use our God given intelligence and a modicum of common sense, we can stem the tide for good! This is something to celebrate! But, our celebrations need to recognize the narrow path we walk between health and disease. This is always the case, not just now during this Covid19 Pandemic.

Yes, we have millions of workers not working right now. But most of them want to work and hundreds of employers have gone further than I ever thought they would to take care of and protect their workers. When we get the chance to reboot, I’m betting that it will be business better than usual. Not necessarily more profits, but better processes and more caring for the human bottom line. We can do amazing things when we remember why we are in business. We might have thought it was to make money, but other people aren’t all that concerned about us making money. What we are really in business for is to meet the needs and expectations of our customers. When we do this well and do it in a way that says I really care about you; people are willing to pay for those goods and services. Part of our caring for our customers is making sure we always operate in the safest and healthiest ways possible. It’s simply not good business to cut corners when it comes to the health and safety of our people, our customers, or our communities.

This is how we will create joy in our new world. We will realize that the best way to be profitable, in the long run, is to be that company that operates from a set of values and principles that holds the health, safety, and wellbeing of employees, clients, customers, colleagues, and community members as essential. Our companies need to guarantee satisfaction on all these levels. When we do this, we will always operate in a way that prevents the spread of diseases, not just Covid19, but all diseases. And that will be something that we can all be joyful about.