Page 11 - BusinessWest March 3, 2021

One Year Later
do. And these people Continued from page 10 are hurting right
BusinessWest: You’re probably all very tired of hearing that phrase ‘new normal’ by now. But please try to project what the new normal will be in your industry and in business in general.
Johnson: The new normal in higher educa- tion is that we have to rethink and reimagine our business model so that we are financially viable while also meeting the needs of our students.
Cooper: Moving forward, we have to focus on the 4 Vs of higher education, and any not-for- profit, caring organization. Value — you need courageous leaders who are thinking not only about work-life balance, but the human element. Virtual — we’re going to have a hybrid mix. We’ve seen that in all the trends, and that’s good; there’s demand for it, some students really like it, and some faculty like it. Virtuous — we’re going to need to continue to be people-centered. For us to move forward, the colleges and the universities that will survive are the ones that are student- centered, that continue to be students at the forefront. And we have to go Viral — we have to find a way to tell our story, whether it’s through discussions like this, through social media, or through our students and faculty.
From my perspective, it’s all about leadership, virtual presence, telling the story, and staying close to your mission.
Senecal: The new norm in the banking busi- ness? I don’t want to get too granular, but the future of our business is very different. There are a little under 5,000 banks in this country — I project that in five to seven years, there will be fewer than 2,500 banks. It will be a digital world. I think you’ll see far fewer branches — you’ll see more and more branches closing.
And from a workforce-development perspec- tive, technology is going to be a huge piece of what we do, and certainly on the mental-health side, I see employers having to be more flexible
One Year Later
Continued on page 13
now. Last Friday, I came in early in the morning and was rounding
in the ICU; there was a nurse who had just lost a COVID patient. She was relatively young, and she was weeping. We need to allow people to grieve in these unprecedented times because we haven’t seen this in our lifetime. People need the ability to express themselves. On the mental side, we
“People recognize fake
really quick, so you’ve got to
be genuine, you’ve got to be
honest with them, you’ve got
to tell them how it is.” PAUL STELZER
need to allow them to talk, and we need to listen. And we need to support our management team and train them on how to do that.
The other thing that’s very unique about this is that many people have aging parents who are in nursing homes, and there’s social isolation — they can’t visit their parents. So not only do they have child-care issues, they are so concerned about their aging parents, and yet they can’t get in to to see them. But beyond the mental, there’s also the physical, and that’s why we’re opening the Zen room, where people can go for 15 min- utes and just decompress.
Also, before, we used to be able to oper-
ate with 80% or 90% of certainty and 10% or 20% of ambiguity. The new normal is ... we’re going to be in a world of ambiguity where it’s more like 50-50 for years to come. The new normal for us also in our industry will be, how do we address and deal with the mental-health challenges of our cur- rent students, our future students, and our employees?
And let me really focus on future stu- dents — students who will be enrolling in our institution two or three years from now will have spent their freshman and sopho-
more years [of high school] basically learning remotely, and that B+ or A- in Calculus in their junior and senior year won’t be the same B+ or A- it was four or five years ago. So students will be coming to us with academic deficits, emotional deficits, anxiety deficits, and we’re going to have to think about how to retool and restructure our- selves to meet their needs on our campuses. And we all have to be focused on the future of work
in terms of educating this next generation of stu- dents for jobs that don’t exist, utilizing technolo- gies that haven’t been created, to solve problems that haven’t been identified.
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FEATURE
MARCH 3, 2021 11
BusinessWest