Was the Pandemic a Missed Opportunity to Think Differently?

How has the pandemic shaped our workforce, our audiences—and perhaps even our values? It’s hard to imagine living through a life-threatening global event without being changed by it. So, what responsibility do we have to our teams? As a culture, are we intent on pushing the whole thing behind us, or are we be striving to emerge from it as better people for having endured it?

This is Heritage Thinking Differently: reflecting on our shared experience, its trauma, and our apparent determination to return to “normal”.

The Immediate Impacts We Acknowledged

Much has been written about how the pandemic disrupted audience engagement, reduced visitor numbers, and altered working patterns. Few organisations have yet regained pre-Covid visitor levels or income. At the same time, the pandemic accelerated changes to the way we work. Many sites now operate with smaller teams, some working partly or entirely from home. Digital communication tools,Teams in particulr, have become workplace staples.

These shifts have been discussed at length elsewhere. But the conversation has focused largely on operational and financial implications, not on the deeper social and emotional impact.

The Shared Yet Untold Experience

Most recently, much of the media coverage has been concentrated on political missteps, rule-breaking, and the behaviour of vaccine sceptics, rather than on our collective lived experience.

We lost loved ones. Relationships fractured. We learned to fear casual contact, and to value more deeply those working on the front line to save lives. Many were trapped in unsafe homes. Nearly all of us lived with fear and uncertainty, navigating a reality that felt like it had been abruptly rewritten.

Across the heritage sector, most of our colleagues were furloughed, while others stayed on to safeguard their organisations. Both groups faced anxiety, though in different ways. Those furloughed often felt isolated, helpless, and disconnected. Those who remained felt the heavy burden of responsibility for the survival of sites and the jobs of their teams.

Yet five years later, there is remarkably little acknowledgement of the fact that this was, for all of us, a shared global trauma.

Furlough Wasn’t an Endless Summer

Furlough is sometimes remembered through a rose-tinted lens, as months of baking bread, learning hobbies, and enjoying “Blitz spirit” camaraderie. For many, it was nothing of the sort. It meant loneliness, fear of neighbours and friends, deep concern for vulnerable family members, and the constant knowledge that stepping outside could be fatal. Some lost loved ones without the chance to say goodbye. There was no “normal” in that reality.

At the time, I was a Museum Director in the independent sector. For my furloughed staff, the frustration of not being able to help save the organisation was acute. They wanted to be part of the solution, but the rules kept them at home. By the time they returned, our collective energy was focused forward, on securing funding, delivering CRF projects, making our workplace safe. For my organisation we were soon after dealing with the consequences of the war in Ukraine, which for us meant dealing with the hike in petrol costs and the impact on visitor numbers to rural sites such as ours.

Reflection was a luxury we did not allow ourselves long to focus on.

A Different Reality for Those Who Stayed

My own experience was shaped by leading a small team who were not furloughed. We worked largely from home, meeting via Zoom, but occasionally needed to visit the site or meet in person; always weighing the risk to ourselves and others. For me, the central challenge was stark: saving the site from closure and safeguarding my team’s jobs.

We entered the pandemic already in a precarious financial position. The weight of responsibility was heavy, and it sat alongside the personal concern we all had for our health and the wellbeing of friends and relatives. The combination was exhausting. We worked without the usual support of our Trustees and we were active on so many fronts that there was no opportunity to acknowledge all we had achieved. We just had to keep moving forward.

In retrospect it may also have been a welcomed distraction, it gave me a focus, a challenge, when my family, personal and emotional life was distorted and unrecognisable. My hyperfocus may have contributed to us navigating the organisational challenges but this was not without cost.

Returning to ‘Normal’

When the museum finally reopened, there was relief—but it wasn’t really normality. We were still cleaning surfaces, maintaining distances, and quietly calculating risks. At first, we shared survival stories. But soon, we fell into step, not singling anyone out, not dwelling on the past. In a room full of equally extraordinary experiences, no one felt their own was unique or worthy of being singled out.

As a team we were fortunate. Only a small number recorded postive for covid and thankfully none experienced family loss. I never knowingly experienced the virus but I was anxious and felt the responsibility to keep others safe. We introduced very strict rules to protect our team and users and maintained a testing and issolation straegy long after the government announced a national relaxation.

Five years on, as a sector, most of our attention is on rebuilding visitor numbers and revenue. From a business perspective, we've moved from helping our communities transition back into normal life to focusing on putting the experience firmly behind us. For those who lost loved ones or who live with long-term health impacts, forgetting is impossible.

What We’ve Yet to Confront

In all this focus on recovery, we rarely address the psychological and emotional impact on our staff. How can we expect people to live through such a profound, frightening event without it influencing their outlook, values, and approach to life?

After most traumatic events—a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, there is a small group of direct victims and a larger group of witnesses. The pandemic was different: everyone was involved. Everyone endured the same prolonged threat. Everyone’s story is shaped by that shared moment in history.

So what is our duty to them, as colleagues and as a sector? Is pretending we’re “back to normal” helping, or is it denying an opportunity for growth? I’m not suggesting we force open old wounds, but acknowledging that scars exist might allow us to strengthen our values and deepen our understanding of one another.

Could This Shape Who We Are?

Our shared experience could (and perhaps should) help shape our identity, values, and purpose as organisations. Could it prompt us to reconsider the stories we tell, the support we offer, and the role we play in our communities? Could it challenge us to evolve?

The truth is, I don’t have all the answers. But I suspect that ignoring the impact of the pandemic risks losing an important opportunity: to honour our colleagues’ experiences, to reflect on what we’ve learned, and to build stronger, wiser, more compassionate institutions as a result.

If anything our politics seems more focussed on nostalgia and returning to a pre-pandemic period than it does on looking forward.

The pandemic has undoubtedly shaped our workforce, our audiences, and our society. And perhaps (just perhaps), our insistence that we’re “back to normal” is the biggest myth of all.

Paul Baker