The coronavirus has been causing problems in our country for more than a year and the government is taking various measures against it. Perhaps the most striking of these are the lockdowns. Lockdown or curfew is another saying that people’s freedom of travel is blocked, and they are locked at home for a certain period of time for their own good.
Let me share some interpretations of the lockdown issues to show other aspects and dig deeper into the idea. First of all, we will explain the issue from the government’s eyes and as if we are the state. We will discuss the policies that have been prepared on this topic and examine how people interact with them. We will also discuss how businesses and individuals are affected by lockdown as it is a practice that involves the entire public. Finally, we will talk about what kind of right and wrong is done in this process.
First of all, let’s talk about why there is a lockdown, and then we can talk about what difficulties and what aspects are taken into account by the government.
There is a lockdown because the government wants to:
- Decrease interaction between people
- Decrease the number of cases
- Use these lockdowns to do more vaccinations
- Decrease the load on the healthcare system
- Encourage tourism activities (giving a good image about the stability of the country while dealing with the COVID-19)
- Take advantage of the lockdown to boost the constructive projects
- Decrease the political protests
These are some aspects of lockdown government considers. So, what about the challenges? What challenges are there for different stakeholders, let me share them:
→ Government:
-The balance between the country’s economic performance and the health care of its citizens.
- Coordination with other stakeholders to reduce the economic impact of the lockdown/curfew on them.
- How can a balance be struck between the country’s short-term and long-term goals?
-How quick should a decision be taken? Time of the lockdown.
→ Mass Media:
-Directing attention to other topics to regulate the heat in the country.
Who was affected by these bans, or in other words, who were vulnerable stakeholders from these implementations and what are their challenges?
→Businesses:
- How do they face lockdown to keep their jobs survive?
- How to strike a balance between cost minimization and layoffs?
- What are some legal problems related to salary cuts and layoff limits?
- How to set a balance between working from home and life at home?
→Individuals:
- Psychological well-being, domestic violence, abuse rate (staying with abusive people)
- For students: Online Education system
- Employees: Work-life balance
Four Archetypes
The gap between the espoused value and behavior: They do not want people to go out, but they make announcements instantly. This causes panic and leads more people to go out because the shutdown will take a long time. Also, they make lockdowns to make people to obey the rules and stay home, but sometimes this led to more illegal activities among people.
Work Avoidance: First, all the places are closed, then they think about results and take precautions.
Competing commitment: The balance between the country’s economic performance and the health care of its citizens is the most competing commitment for the government.
Speaking the unspeakable: There are some transparency issues with government and citizens. Real numbers are not shared with people, and nobody can say anything about this. Also, since protests are not allowed, people cannot to say their complaints publicly.
Mobilize the System
There are lots of challenges for different stakeholders, first let’s group them as technical challenges and adaptive challenges and make interpretations about them:
Technical Challenges:
a. Deficiencies of the online systems is a big challenge; all the systems went online but not all of these are fully adapted.
b. The technical difficulty of allocating stimulus or emergency aid payable to companies, individuals, or institutions. And how will those be paid?
c. For individuals, some tried to find a quick fix not to be in the same place as their abuser.
d. Educational difficulties for students. Most of them lived in dormitories and returning to their families destroyed the environment for education. (Unstable internet connection or lack of equipment) Also national education was interrupted.
Adaptive Challenges:
a. For Government:
- To maintain the balance of coping with economic difficulties and controlling the mandatory closures.
- In the midst of the crisis, prioritizing and putting government issues in order. Making plans for each of them by considering their decisions and results.
- Is it to focus on short-term goals or long-term goals, to save the moment or to act cautiously by thinking ahead?
b. For Businesses:
- Establishing the balance between mandatory expenses and layoffs
- Lack of communication and company meetings, inability to work effectively with physical products in the virtual environment (no chance to touch products and meeting-like feedbacks)
- Managing the balance between operating expenses and cash holding for long-term plans and R&D strategic objectives (risk of bankruptcy)
- Since international transportation is interrupted, finding alternative incomes as an international business become a survival challenge.
c. For Individuals:
- Lack of social life may cause socio-psychologic problems for both social and non-social people. Adaptation to normal life would be a big challenge.
- Keeping the balance of work/study life and social life.
Orchestrate the Conflict Among Parties
Working with unions to orchestrate the opposition may be a logical approach. If an alliance can be established with union leaders, who are representatives of these sectors, rather than dealing with many different sectors one by one, the conflict here can be settled much more easily with that kind of a political move. In this way, both authorities will be provided informally, and new allies will facilitate the control of practices in the field. In addition, if schools, companies, ministries, hospitals and health institutes and municipalities cooperate, the process and conflict can be managed much more easily. Still there might be some questions like “Should their views be included and taken into account, or should there be direct and obligatory rules?”
One example is related to food companies or delivery companies. The problem was delivery hours, and they have dispute about fewer customers in limited time, so government extended the restricted time until midnight. This is a good example of orchestrating conflict. Also, another example is the dispute between the hotels and the government. Since they cannot attract enough customers to hotels today, they want some restrictions on travel to our country to be lifted, and this will increase the number of tourists coming to the country for attention. PCR tests or not quarantining people for 15 days will increase the number of tourists.
Elephants in the room
The elephants in the room are the metamorphically explaining the things that are obvious and everyone know but nobody bring it to discuss, or no one mentions about the problem. In the lockdown issue, first elephant is statistics of real COVID-19 numbers. It is not mentioned by anybody, most people started to accept what is shared but everyone knows those are not real numbers.
Another elephant is HES codes, some people should be staying at home even in the allowed hours since they got covid, but unfortunately majority of people do not care about it. So, everybody knows there is a code to quarantine infected people and provide safety in closed places like malls to other people, but some used their relatives’ codes to enter those places. Even HES codes are not validated, people did not mention about it.
There are other elephants like the effectiveness of lockdown times, bad economic effect of lockdown on merchants or online education problems of students, validity of exams etc. still most of them are not discussed. This makes challenge deeper and more complex.
See yourself as a System
Knowing the triggers might be helpful to keep steadiness. Miscommunication between political organizations such as parties should be kept under control. There will be some dissenters (always against your opinion, good or bad) but we should tolerate them and not react. Also, there might be some miscommunication among ministries as well (e.g., between ministry of health and tourism). These are inevitable consequences of the system; although there are disagreements, we must establish our own authority, taking into account the expectations of everyone else.
Pay attention to your hungers and others’ expectations
It is necessary to be aware of people’s psychological and physical desires while pushing the lockdown. Our situation, reputation and numbers among other countries should be compared and they need to be kept at the desired level. Also, the private-public relationship should be supported all the time even in lockdown.
Identify the scope of authority
The biggest challenge for lockdown is to protect people from covid while considering economic, political, social, and environmental situations. Some people did not want to stay at home all the time and argued that the lockdown could only be enforced under a state of emergency and that the requirement to wear masks on the streets was unconstitutional. People who violated the restrictions are fined with circulars, and there was a great challenge here about the scope of authority. Still, these discussions are continuing about the legality of such notices or fines.
Deploy yourself
The difficulty of prioritizing the economy over health care due to the country’s situation may not be able to handle the down sides of the lockdown. There are ethical dilemmas among countries about locking down people or setting them free. As a government, you should be aware of the consequences of both sides and decide on your values. Since the economic situation is going worse in Turkey, the government decided to keep the economy alive by lifting lockdown in the summer and seeing the effect of tourism income as well as vaccinating people to keep risks minimum. The purpose of using the media is to communicate with citizens, to inform them about the possible dangers of covid, the lockdown reasons, and to share accurate information or data.
Incompetences
When the first lockdown was made, it is announced on Friday, and it caused to a panic. It was the first incompetence that increased spread. The second one is that it was not allowed to sell specific items on the market, such as personal hygiene products for women, alcohol, kitchenware etc. There was massive resistance against this on social media. Also, citizens were not allowed to travel between cities, but foreigners were allowed to do; for instance, police were checking if they are foreigners or citizens on the beaches. The lack of integration between institutions was a shame, ministries were not cooperating. Lastly, restaurants are allowed to open, but there are restrictions on closing at 12 o’clock for any music venue, such as nightclubs or other similar venues. People thought it was political and unrelated to covid, and they harshly opposed it.
We saw that importance of growing a support network is essential. Whether formal or informal, people who support on social media and influence others may control crisis and have power.
Potential solutions for challenges
Many large companies and holdings sent their employees completely home when the virus peaked and switched to a full-time work-from-home model. Moreover, some of them offered individual workstation opportunities close to their homes to the employees, where they were both protected and able to work in an office environment.
Officers working in the public sector and some companies in the private sector also worked alternately by dividing the working hours into shifts. In this way, despite the restrictions, the team risks were reduced.
Universities and educational institutions might have opened with some distance regulations for the applications and laboratories, and essential topics could be covered.
Alternatively, instead of locking down the whole country, some voluntary activities might be followed. Psychologically, people might feel responsible to others and keep outside time minimum. (In South Korea, it worked)
So, we saw how challenging it is to handle adaptive challenges and analyzing them gives us a broader vision and mindset. Thanks to adaptive leadership and resilience practices, we started to internalize the adaptive leadership perspective and overcome the crisis.
