When Walker Wells thinks about the future of housing in a post-pandemic world, he sees green. “Green housing comes out of sustainability,” he says. It “looks at the relationship between the environment, social equity and the economy.”

Even before the pandemic, homelessness was one of the major problems facing the U.S., especially in megacities. The crisis of unaffordability is a problem born of success. As cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York have grown increasingly affluent, the cost of housing has skyrocketed, becoming out of reach for many of the workers who make urban life possible but whose wages have not kept up with housing inflation.

Efforts to address the housing shortage by building subsidized units often run into “not-in-my-backyard” resistance, even from those who recognize and want to solve the problem of the unhoused. Enter “greening”—a word Wells says is purposefully chosen to show ongoing action, and which can appeal to those with a desire to fight climate change. “People conflate older, deteriorated public housing … with all affordable housing,” he says. Yet “green often goes along with quality. A certified green rating gives people confidence that [affordable housing] will be well designed, maintained and attractive.”

Wells, a principal at Raimi+Associates who teaches a class on “Green Urbanism” for Pomona students, wants to dispel the notion that green building is too expensive for affordable housing. “Reluctance—maybe resistance—can come from housing advocates,” says Wells. “They sense it is a zero-sum game, trading green for units.” In fact, he believes that in a world facing climate change and the possibility of future economic disruptions, not building green may be what is too costly. The dollar difference is, in his words, “shockingly low.”

Building green only adds about 2 to 2 1⁄2 percent to the project budget. “Higher-quality, more-efficient equipment will save more money than it costs by a factor of three,” he notes.

One significant development in affordable housing could be greater use of prefabricated, modular housing units that are built in a mass-production factory, shipped to their final destination, and then “stacked up like Lego bricks,” says Wells. In theory, the units could be built more quickly in a controlled, resource-efficient environment. So far, though, Wells notes, modular construction has not yet been demonstrated to be more cost-effective than traditional building methods.

Each year, Wells asks his students to analyze their own ecological footprint—how many Earths does it take to sustain their lifestyle? “A number of them say, ‘When I’m out of school, I can do this green stuff,’” he remarks. “But sharing living spaces, being frugal, are all part of being green as well. An LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] house on top of a mountain that you drive to in a Tesla may not be more green than sharing an apartment built in the ’70s and only turning on the A/C when desperate,” Wells says. “When they are in a position to choose on housing,” going green “will be a consideration.”

Wells sees positive trends continuing in housing, among them net-zero design so buildings offset their energy use, and “biophilia”—reflecting a desire to be connected to other living things. “There’s so much innovation going on,” he says.

Election Day—at least as we knew it—is a thing of the past. The pandemic expanded and accelerated a U.S. shift toward vote-by-mail and early voting that turned Election Day into voting season instead.

And the tradition of Election Night as a television production that inevitably reaches its exciting conclusion with concession and victory speeches before people go to bed on the West Coast? Also kaput. Bush v. Gore took care of that in 2000 when the U.S. Supreme Court finally decided the election less than two weeks before Christmas. But delayed results may become increasingly common, particularly in down-ballot races, as voting by mail and slower validation and counting of ballots become more entrenched in American democracy.

“I do think that as a country, we might have to get used to the idea that we don’t know who wins the election on Election Day,” says Debra Cleaver ’99, the founder and CEO of VoteAmerica, the latest in the series of nonprofit voter registration and turnout organizations she has started, Vote.org among them.

Still, in a world where seemingly everything has gone online due to the pandemic, do not expect voting to follow.

“No to online voting. That would be a wonderful way for us to get 160 percent voter turnout,” Cleaver says.

“The Internet is horribly insecure. I imagine someone will point out that we bank online. Bank accounts are FDIC insured,” Cleaver says. “I think we are very far from online voting, whereas voting by mail, it’s so insanely secure. The most secure vote is a vote on a piece of paper. When we vote by mail, there is an actual piece of paper.”

Ever strategic, Cleaver considers the vulnerabilities by gaming it out. “It would be very hard for me personally to rig an election held by mail, whereas I mean, my tech team could absolutely hack the … out of an election held online. So yeah, let’s not vote online. All the votes will come from Russia. It’s a fair question. But I hope the answer to that is never.”

Cleaver has been engaged in the vote-by-mail movement since 2008, when she founded Long Distance Voter, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing turnout by making it easier to vote by mail.

Underlying all her efforts is the historically low voter registration and turnout in the U.S.—though Donald Trump became an extremely unlikely ally, driving the massive turnout in the November election. Before 2020, the percentage of the voting-eligible population to cast a ballot in a presidential election hadn’t reached 65% since 1908.

“Americans don’t need to be convinced to vote. They need to be able to vote,” Cleaver says. “It is objectively harder to cast a ballot in the United States than in any other nation with democratically elected leadership. Once you start there, it’s just a matter of identifying what’s keeping them from voting.”

VoteAmerica and other voter sites offer tools to help people register to vote, check their status, sign up for vote-by-mail or find their polling place. In VoteAmerica’s quest to remove roadblocks, it came up with another.

“Sixty-seven percent of Americans don’t have printers,” Cleaver says. “So if you need to print a mail-in form, you can’t. At the end of our workflows, for people with these printed mail-in forms, there’s now a line that says, ‘Click here if you need us to print and mail this form to you.’ And we do that.”

Voting by mail has other benefits, including cost savings.

“It’s actually expensive to have polling places. You have to pay for poll workers. You have to do all that training with them. You have to map citizens to polling stations—it’s just a tedious administrative process,” she says.

Despite fears related to the decisions that slowed the U.S. Postal Service, as well as worries about tampering, widespread voting by mail is likely here to stay.

“The first year that a state votes by mail, people are a little thrown off by the process. Change is hard for people. But then it becomes overwhelmingly preferred by citizens,” Cleaver says.

“Some lower-propensity people will say that they didn’t vote because they didn’t feel like they knew enough. But when we move to vote-by-mail, people have more time to research what’s on their ballot. And so not only does it increase turnout, it increases the percentage of people who vote the entire ballot, not just top of ticket, because people have time to research all the weird things on your ballot, like judges and ballot measures.

“People prefer vote-by-mail by an overwhelming margin once they have it. I think we’ll see more and more states move to vote-by-mail, which is great because it will increase participation.”

Lo, I will be with you always … even unto the end of a pandemic. Adapting the final words of Jesus for his church might be, well, appropriate—and not just for Christians. In the time of COVID-19, people of all faiths are improvising ways to worship without the danger of gathering.

The Right Reverend Megan Traquair ’85, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern California, is leading and watching the congregations under her care as they pray and pivot during the pandemic.

In keeping with state and county health directives, Episcopalians in California—like adherents of all religions—are not doing worship as usual. The gathering of the faithful is a core value—indeed, the point—of most ideas of church or temple. For Christians, when assembly isn’t possible, baptisms, weddings, funerals, communion and ordination services all face constraints—but community has not been not canceled. In a span of two weeks, 60 online churches were launched in Traquair’s diocese alone.

“People just rose to the occasion and started to stream worship from their living room or from the church as they were able,” says Traquair. “Some of our clergy were older, so they were under quarantine in California. And so they were streaming from their dining room or their living room, and they were leading worship.”

Troquair believes online church has actually been a boon for the diocese, not a bust. Attendance has increased. Perhaps, she posits, that’s because the fear factor diminishes when you don’t have to worry about parking or childcare. And of course, “once you sit in a pew and a sermon starts, you’re kind of stuck,” she adds. Online church “has been a wonderful way to get a flavor of what worship is like—lots more people are seeing it,” says Traquair.

While regulations remain, human connection can’t be contained. Traquair tells the story of the “Petunia Brigade” up near Eureka, California, where an older woman who is a church member there is isolated and lonely, with neither a computer nor a cellphone. Enter the brigade.

“One person brought a beautiful petunia and hung it outside of her dining room window. The rest of the congregation takes turns coming over to water the petunia baskets. And when they do, they put in a phone call to her. And they talk to each other on the phone looking at each other through the window under the petunia.”

This isn’t just a time to look through windows—it’s also a moment to take a look into the mirror. Reflecting on what the church will become in days and years to come post-coronavirus, Traquair says its role remains the same. The tools are what have changed. For example, in-person feeding ministries are now preparing sack lunches to go.

“In the Episcopal Church, we understand that we are called to reconcile all people to God through Jesus Christ. And there are many steps in that, but one of the primary steps is connection. And we live out that connection by loving our neighbor and by serving each other.”

With the world in the heat of panic, what about the church’s temperature? While people are pretty threadbare, Traquair says, one thing remains.

“I would say that a clear feeling I get from folks is one of gratitude. We appreciate what we have now and what we had and what we will have again.”

There are prayers in the Episcopal Church that are recited together, and there is no trouble keeping mostly in sync, Traquair says. But if the sanctuary offers unison, Zoom offers cacophony.

“And many of us have embraced that and said, ‘Bring on the chaos, that’s fine.’ But every once in a while, I’ll hear someone say, ‘We had an outdoor service, and we also had the Lord’s Prayer together, and we said it in unison.’ And then they get a blissful look over their face, because—who knew that that was something to be so grateful for? But we know now, and we are grateful.”

Empty store shelves with food and supplies shortage during virus epidemic.

Half-stocked shelves, meatpacking plant shutdowns, broken supply chains. Food scarcity is not what Americans expected in the 21st century, but it became a reality early in the pandemic. It may be but a hint of global food issues ahead, not only because of more frequent pandemics but also because of climate change.

Jan Low ’78 holds a Ph.D. from Cornell in agricultural economics and was a co-laureate of the 2016 World Food Prize for her work on biofortified sweetpotatoes in sub-Saharan Africa. Through Low’s efforts with her team, the improved sweetpotato—rich in vitamin A—has become an established part of the diet in many parts of the region, helping save the eyesight of hundreds of thousands of children while strengthening the nutrition and food security of millions of people.

In Kenya, where Low leads the Sweetpotato for Profit and Health Initiative of the International Potato Center, COVID-19 was effectively contained during the first phase of the pandemic, in part because of significant government restrictions. (With a population of about 54 million, Kenya had about 1,100 COVID-19 deaths through early November, according to the World Health Organization.)

“But food prices now are going up, and of course the big concern is the quality of the diet,” Low says. “The households that are very poor, obviously, when these kinds of things start to happen, diet is what drops out first. Your animal-source foods, your fruits and vegetables. People eat fewer meals a day, and they rely on their staples.”

As the world emerges from the pandemic, Low says, “we should wake up and see the problems in the global food system.”

“We recognize that during these peak periods of time, the quality of diets really goes down, particularly for the poorest households. But when we build back, let’s try and make it a more equitable, healthier system than the one that’s been evolving.”

More difficult times lie ahead, Low says. In East Africa, climate change already is contributing to erratic rainfall and unseasonable temperatures that impact agricultural output. A plague of locusts even descended in some areas—floods in others, all in the same year.

Not only the developing world faces food challenges, however. “I think one of the very, very worrying challenges that the U.S. will face is we are the global grain producers,” Low says. “Out in the Midwest, those are the fields that feed the world,and they’re facing climate change for the first time. A lot of those fields in Iowa are not irrigated. They’ve had dependable regular rainfall. And some of that is changing now.”

Meat is likely to go up in cost as livestock feed grains become more expensive, though people might also move toward consuming less meat out of health and environmental concerns.

“Everybody says, you know, everything’s going to dramatically change … but I think behavioral change is very hard,” Low says. “So the question will be, unless there’s really an investment to change the inequities in our income systems, the inequalities are going to grow more.

“I fear for the United States because I look at the rates and divisions of inequality between rich and poor, and Kenya has the same problem. There’s a wealthy class. There is a small but growing middle class. And then there’s this huge number of poor people.

“At some point in time, people say enough is enough. So, you know, we’re really at one of those critical points.”

The sudden disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic had the   potential to upend Shayok Chakraborty’s work as a community organizer with the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization. “The whole point of the job is to have one-to-one meetings with people, listen to people’s stories and eventually gather someplace in a public fashion,” he explains. How could that work continue amid public health restrictions?

Now, Chakraborty ’19 has come to see Zoom as a new part of the activist toolkit while the fundamentals of the work remain the same. In his view, there is a potential upside to the upheavals of the year 2020: “People are seeing things they maybe didn’t have to think about,” he says. “People don’t stick around in organizing or activism unless it is real to them in their own life. … There will hopefully be some longer-term base-building, awakening, consciousness.”

Three thousand miles from Boston, Darrell Jones III ’14 is also working to change the dynamics of power in communities. He had never seen himself as an activist but “tried to do what I do with an open heart and let my open heart lead the way,” he says. And although active in the business world, he “always had this other part of me that needed to act, to make compassion a verb in some way, shape or form.”

Jones is deputy director of Just Cities, based in Oakland, California, an organization co-founded by the late Congressman Ron Dellums. Jones says that “we like to proceed with something we call transformative justice, where we center the voices of those most proximate to pain.”

Both Chakraborty and Jones see pros and cons in the role technology is playing in activism. Technology makes possible breadth—”You can reach a bunch of folks very quickly,” says Jones. “It allows a lot of voices to be heard.” But “oftentimes we sacrifice depth,” he adds.  “Expertise, truth and authority can go by the wayside.”

Chakraborty says that he “used to be super-scornful of online activism”—

sometimes called “clicktivism.” “There’s a strain of activism that is about posting a super-funny tweet, a clever one-liner, and that’s it,” he says. “That’s deeply irritating. A lot of people are going through a lot of stuff. When you make it into saying something smart and get some likes and then       let’s move on, that’s not enough.” But, Chakraborty concludes, “I’ve grown to see there is a real use for it. Clicktivism helps a lot of people learn about these things and get into it.”

Ultimately, Jones sees a big part of the future of activism as “an invitation for each individual to go deeper within their own sense of self, in their own heart space, and try to infuse how they show up with a spirit of compassion and love.”

Chakraborty’s hope for activism in a post-pandemic world is that people won’t give up. “There’s always a pattern where a crisis will happen, and people get angry and grief-stricken or whatever they are feeling. They come together, do great stuff, and once it’s over, they leave, move on with their lives,” he says. “As much as people can stay, just stay doing some kind of work, whatever it means for them—that’s the only way we’ll make the long-term changes we are talking about.”

As the country continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, childcare is among the toughest challenges for parents and employers alike.

Prior to the pandemic, about half of U.S. families reported having trouble finding care for a young child, according to the Center for American Progress. That number shot to nearly two-thirds this past spring as childcare centers closed and other in-home caretakers were told to stay home during lockdown orders.

“Now more than ever, children have come to the forefront,” says Shadiah Sigala ’06, as she holds her two-year-old on her lap during a PCM interview conducted via Zoom.

She speaks from personal experience as the mother of two young children, but also as the co-founder and CEO of Kinside, an app that assists employers offering childcare benefits. When an employer partners with Kinside, its employees can use the service to browse and find reliable childcare options for their families.

Sigala’s impetus for her newest entrepreneurial effort was inspired in part by her own experience with motherhood.

“I had a kid while co-founding my former company [Honeybook.com]. I now had a baby, and then my family leave period ended. How do I do this as a working mother? So I instituted the first family-related benefits, policies and organizational structures at the company, which was undergoing a big baby boom. As a company executive I asked myself, what is the experience like for my employees? And how do we show that we’re paying attention to this? So definitely, this was born out of personal need and our employees’ needs.”

Sigala says the pandemic has exposed the fact that the childcare system in America is both fragile and under-resourced. “To give context, about two-thirds of households in the U.S. are dual working households where both parents work,” she says. “On top of that, working mothers take on a larger load of childcare. Working mothers average 22 hours of childcare per week, on top of their full-time jobs.”

The pandemic has only made things worse.

“It really doesn’t matter if you are a frontline worker, an hourly worker, which is usually who suffers the most silently, or if you are middle management or an executive at a company. We’re all in this together,” she says. “And this is usually where we find an inflection point—where those in power and influence experience a pain point and they feel compelled to fix it.”

So what are employers doing to alleviate the challenges of childcare for their employees? “They realize that this is literally impacting their very bottom line,” says Sigala. “On top of productivity losses, it is estimated that about one in five working parents is saying that either they or their partner are considering leaving the workforce. Imagine that 20 to 30% of your employees are experiencing this? That is a significant portion of your employee base.”

“The most obvious incentive is that employers are offering subsidies for childcare for the first time, especially those employers who have employees that are essential and on the front lines. For example, we’re seeing many health organizations, who employ our nurses and doctors, folks who are absolutely essential. In order to keep them going, their employers are offering a childcare subsidy.”

Other employers are making their parental benefits more robust. That can mean anything from maternity or paternity leave to support for new parents who are returning to work, including childcare.

Sigala points out that working parents, and particularly mothers, are not only caring for children but sometimes caring for multiple members of their family, whether they live with them or not.

“Employers are really looking at this very holistically. We’re find­ing that suddenly they want it al,l or at least more, when it comes to family benefits. Whereas before, they were considering adding one new benefit; now they’re considering several, ranging from mental health to fertility to childcare. And whereas these benefits used to be considered perks, organizations are strategically moving their energy and efforts of family benefits into the ‘essential’ bucket.”

As coronavirus cases spiked across the country in the fall, companies continued to recalibrate their work environments. Working from home may have seemed a temporary measure back in the spring, but it’s now becoming a more permanent solution for many.

Microsoft announced in early October that it will allow some of its employees to work from home until at least 2021, joining others such as Target and Ford Motor Company, as these companies struggle to figure out how to arrange offices in a way that keeps workers socially distanced and safe. Facebook took it one step further, allowing employees to work from home permanently.

While a move away from an in-office culture makes it harder to create connections and serendipitous moments of creativity, Laszlo Bock ’93, founder and CEO of Humu and former head of People Operations at Google, told the Wall Street Journal that right now, checking in on how an organization’s team members are doing is the most important thing an employer can do to keep them productive. No one should be surprised, he said, that the productivity gains that accompanied the move to remote work have now leveled off as fatigue has begun to set in.

“It was people being terrified of losing their jobs,” he told the Journal, “and that fear-driven productivity is not sustainable.”

Still, the experience with remote work has caused some companies to consider whether their employees need to be in the office at all, says Carol Fishman Cohen ’81, chair and co-founder of the career reentry firm iRelaunch. “Whereas face time in the office used to be a priority, the pandemic has forced a reckoning of whether productivity levels are equal or even higher if employees are working virtually.”

According to a recent study released by Upwork, it’s estimated that an astonishing 14 million to 23 million Americans intend to relocate to a different city or region as a result of telework.

The implications, Fishman Cohen said, are huge, no matter whether you’re an employer or an employee. “For employers, if roles are not location-specific, companies can search for talent anywhere in the country, and for some, the world. They can rethink their expenditures on real estate and business travel. For employees, taking location out of the equation means they can live anywhere they want and can move out of high-cost-of-living urban centers to smaller cities or more-remote locations if they choose.”

Disruption and Opportunity

The ability of workers to work from home, however, depends on a couple of things. Obviously but importantly, it depends on the survival of the organizations that employ them—and in times like these, that can be a stressful concern. It also depends on technologies that are being adopted in a rush and often stretched to their limits. For organizations and their employees alike, the name of the game during the time of COVID-19 has been coping with the resulting disruptions.

Organizations of all kinds have felt the shockwave from COVID-19 on their notion of business as usual, says Jose Low ’96, HR business partner at Port Logistics Group. The degree of impact, however, depends on the industry, the type of organization and its previous level of technology.

Adapting to the challenges has been especially tough for small businesses in which higher levels of in-person, face-to-face involvement and interaction are required to get the job done, according to Low. “Larger and medium-sized companies that have incorporated technology in the last few decades to allow a portion of their workforce to remotely connect in and to virtually collaborate and complete tasks and workflows seemingly have been able to flex and minimize disruptions,” he explained.

Organizations have also faced disruption due to their dependence on the global economy, he noted. “Despite individual functions and organizations being able to adapt more quickly through technical capabilities, we’ve seen and experienced that a disruption in some part of the supply chain network still significantly impacts other areas—affecting the production and delivery of products as well as performance of services.”

However, despite  all the roadblocks the pandemic has dropped into the world of work, it has also created a few opportunities.

Fishman Cohen works with employers to create “returnships” and other programs to bring back mid- to senior-level talent after career breaks for childcare, eldercare and other reasons. A ‘relauncher’ herself, Fishman Cohen’s return to work at investment firm Bain Capital after an 11-year career break was the subject of a Harvard Business School case study.

“Even before the pandemic, relaunchers typically feel pretty isolated in their experiences while trying to return to work after a multiyear career break,” says Fishman Cohen. “Now, with unemployment levels having spiked and still remaining high, ‘relaunchers’ are feeling more vulnerable, because they picture themselves standing in line behind millions of newly unemployed, which makes them feel their chances of getting hired are even slimmer.”

But the pandemic has also created an urgent demand for medical and technology professionals to return to work from retirement or a career break. “Any prior stereotypes and hesitations typically associated with hiring back older workers disappeared in our country’s hour of need, and these professionals reintegrated back into the workforce efficiently and effectively,” says Fishman Cohen.

For his part, Low believes that the pandemic is giving us a glimpse of what work may look like in the future. “It’ll take time, and different areas will experience different rates of change, including traditionally labor-intensive areas that require care and fine dexterity and manipulation.”

Workplace Newbies

Of all of the members of the workforce, perhaps the hardest hit are the young people just preparing to enter it. They’re the ones Hazel Raja, senior director of the Career Development Office at Pomona College, worries about on a daily basis.

“In terms of challenges, one thing that I don’t think people talk enough about is the mental and emotional impact of the pandemic on these young adults,” she says. “Our alums and students may be juggling a lot. Some may have different responsibilities off-campus compared to the responsibilities they had when classes were in session on campus; so their ability to set up informational interviews and/or to do career research may be difficult because of their living situation, household responsibilities, part-time jobs, etc. It’s no doubt a challenging time for many, but the transition from college is already a bumpy one without a pandemic.”

Raja points out, however, that there may also be some upsides to the COVID era that college students and new graduates should bear in mind. Even though current opportunities to connect in person with potential employers and recruiters are limited to virtual programming and events, for some this may become an advantage.

“Students who thrive in an online environment will feel a lot more comfortable engaging behind the screen. This environment removes some, but not all, of the awkwardness and nervousness that may be attached to new introductions,” she adds. “Moreover, the pandemic may open up space for students to really consider what they want to focus on as far as career prospects. Many new industries and career fields will be created through this pandemic, and our students’ liberal arts education can set them up beautifully for what’s on the horizon.”

“Crickets.” That’s all Daniel Post Senning ’99 of The Emily Post Institute—great-great-grandson of the grande dame of etiquette herself—says he heard about manners the first two weeks after COVID-19 hit the U.S. hard. But etiquette-in-place soon became a thing.

The first manners-related issue that came to the institute was surrounding the touchy issue of the greeting: “Can I say no to a handshake?” Of course, says Senning. For him, that’s not a manners question so much as a safety precaution—and safety supersedes etiquette.

What is in the realm of etiquette is how you now manage a greeting, he says. He has a few pointers: Use your voice, use your words, smile with your eyes, and maybe take a cue from another culture. Senning has adopted a gesture that is common in the Muslim world: placing a hand over one’s heart and taking a small bow or offering a slight nod. “It’s really sweet. It’s really personal. It actually sets up a physical boundary—like, I’ve got you in my heart. I’m holding you close, and I’m not extending my hand.”

What about masking? Is it proper to ask someone to put on a mask? Senning says the key is to avoid shame, embarrassment or insults. “This all sounds really obvious but ‘Could you please stay away from me? I can’t believe you’re not wearing a mask,’ is a very different thing than ‘I’m so much more comfortable when people are wearing masks. Would you mind stepping back a few feet?’ Big, big difference in tone, but also in terms of how you’re setting up the relationship and where your expectations are coming from.”

When the reminder is offered in the spirit of camaraderie, good-natured accountability and humor, a gentle nudge can go far and be appreciated, he says. “The vast majority of rude behavior is unintentional and something someone would self-correct if they were even aware of the effect it was having.”

What about Zoom etiquette?

It’s a multipurpose medium, says Senning. But there are a few things to keep in mind. Whether it’s a business call from your home office (or kitchen pantry) or a personal conversation from your easy chair, you’re accountable for questions of discretion and privacy as well as distraction. You must offer the courtesy of explaining who’s in the room and whether you will be recording. “When you’re broadcasting someone’s voice into a room, you should let them know who’s hearing it, both as a question of discretion and privacy. They should know your intern is sitting there hearing every word or that you’re in a public space where people could be walking through.”

And turn on that camera to avoid the pajama assumption. Because if you don’t, “it reads very plainly that that person, for whatever reason, isn’t prepared, isn’t working in a way that they’re capable or willing to show what they’re doing at that moment.”

What you’re doing at the moment at the grocery store matters, too. During a pandemic, do you buy that first apple you touch? Yes, says Senning. Knocking on fruit and smelling it is not COVID-appropriate behavior. “It’s important to adjust our behavior and take into account others.” Doing so demonstrates a measure of grace and poise that sets people apart, he says.

Living in social isolation does raise the specter of people forgetting how to behave around others. Empathy is a skill, and researchers who study it measure vagal tone—the degree to which your heart rate fluctuates based on your mental or emotional state. Vagal tone atrophies as we have less human-to-human interaction. So our capacity to empathize and the systems that regulate our biological responses based on the emotional cues we’re getting weaken if not exercised.

But all will not be lost, says Senning, because those systems can also get stronger very quickly. Face-to-face interactions improve vagal tone rapidly. Empathy improves with practice.

So although the pandemic has turned everything inside out and upside down, including proper manners, one thing remains true about etiquette regardless of the times, says Senning: It’s about making choices that prioritize relationships.

“I like to advise people to proceed with a lot of compassion for themselves and for the people around them,” says Senning. “So, proceed with compassion and understanding, and you’ll probably be OK whatever comes up.”