I’ve been observing the same things. It seems to depend on the kind of company and the structure and culture of the company. Larger organizations have something called a crisis plan. And people are used to the fact that in the crisis plan, the first thing they talk about is essential and non-essential. The thinking, the mindsets, the feelings of being excluded or included are very clear.
In the beginning, nobody fights that because it makes sense. When you have a huge accident on the highway you don’t want every driver to stop and help clear the crash; you want the people who know what they’re doing to come in, impose order and, once everybody’s fine, things go back to normal. What I’ve seen in the early moments of this COVID-19 crisis, everyone was almost comforted by the fact that there are people who know what they’re doing and allowed them to make decisions. But this has gone on so long that the mindset is changing. We don’t really know if a small group of people making decisions actually is the best way right now. Maybe there are many perspectives that need to be considered. And then, people start wondering whether those decision-makers are seeing everything. Maybe they have blind spots and it boils down to this feeling of “why are they excluding me?”
In smaller companies, where remote working cultures have been common, or those who have always maintained a democratic non-structure, they don’t have this, because they probably didn’t have the luxury of having an established crisis plan. They have to go back to their roots which is “Let’s get everybody’s best thinking, let’s be as agile as possible. Let’s all decide what’s the best way around this.” Together they come up with ideas and solutions by breaking into smaller teams and letting everybody surface their ideas, on a weekly basis, for example.