For the past few weeks, I have been working remote in my kitchen. I have my monitors set up and my commute is much shorter than it has ever been (from bedroom to kitchen).

It’s funny because some employers fully embraced the digital transformation a long time ago. When it came time to close shop and start working from home a few weeks ago, it was no big deal.

But a lot of employers have “kind of” embraced the digital transformation. They worked on their websites and their internal systems, but a lot of employers, both in the public and the private space, were not prepared to send all of their workers home with a laptop and expect them to continue being as productive at home they’ve been in the office.

I think the recent events are going to cause a lot of employers to redesign their systems and how they do business. After the COVID 19 concerns die down, I think things will go back to normal, but a new normal. I think in the new normal, it is probable that we see employers offering “work from home” as a benefit, as they are probably going to build out infrastructure to accommodate these types of things anyways.

This might or might not be directly applicable to some Police and Fire Rescue readers out there, but there are undoubtedly changes coming to the world that we all live in.

Webinars, Zoom meetings, and screen sharing is all now more common than it was a few months ago. And this can certainly be a good thing.
Another thing that I have noticed amidst all the chaos is quite comforting: people are being nicer to other people.

We see this in times of tragedy. After 9/11, I remember all the American Flags on cars like it was yesterday. The thought of it still sense shivers down my spine and makes the hair stand up. We were all American and proud of it! Tragedy has an interesting way of uniting us.

I was on the phone the other day with a customer service representative on the other side of a 1-800 number. I try to always be polite to people when I talk to them on the phone, but we’ve all had the experience with a 1-800 phone call where we get frustrated the person on the other end for one reason or another.

When I was on the phone with this person, I could hear her talking to her young child in the background. She was also working from home, juggling family and work, just like me. She was a person, a real person, and not just a customer service representative from XYZ Company.

Unfortunately, on the other side of COVID 19, I know most people will go back to the way things were. But I do hope that we take the empathy that we feel in times of tragedy and try to hang onto that for just a little bit longer and hopefully incorporate this into our “new normal”.

Gregg Brant, CFP®, APMA®, MBA

Family Wealth Advisor | Contributor

Gregg is a financial planner who is passionate about helping first responders and their families navigate their financial lives with confidence. Having a spouse who is a professor in the State University System, Gregg has worked with the Florida Retirement System first-hand for his own personal financial planning.

Now Gregg is on a mission to take this knowledge and disseminate it to the people who deserve it most; our first responders.