How To Keep Your Team At Ease Amidst The COVID-19 Pandemic

The world is going through tough times. COVID-19 has made me realize the fragility of the human race. Amidst these tough times, it is quite easy to lose your calm and blast your anger on your teams, especially when they have become confined to their homes working while constantly under the threat of this pandemic. 

The world leaders are faced with the challenge to maintain things under control so that people don’t get demented. And, it’s just their responsibility to keep things in harmony. We all must, at our individual levels, take steps to ensure that people we are connected to don’t panic. 

Well, if you have been asking questions like, “Why did you miss that deadline?” “How could you miss my last email?” “Why is your project off-track?” or “Why is there a sharp decline in your productivity?”, you are doing nothing good to keep your team at ease. 

Finding it difficult to manage your teams while working from home? You must try ProofHub. 

I am going to share what you as a leader must be doing instead of asking these questions:

• Empathize 

Empathy goes a long way when it comes to making people comfortable. By being empathetic you are going to build the level of trust in your leader-teammate relationship that is going to last forever. 

Asking questions like ‘how are you?’ ‘is everything okay?’ ‘are your family members okay?’ is a great way to strike a conversation and let the other person know you care for them. Not only will it help strengthen the bond, but it will also serve as a means to calm-them down amidst all the chaos created by the coronavirus spread. 

• Help them set up

You might have a proper arrangement to work from home, but not everyone does. You never know, how all of a sudden they have had to create a makeshift work-from-home station just to cope up with the situation. 

Under such circumstances, offering support to the team member by asking whether they need any kind of assistance in setting up their work station and more can be just the right step. If required, help them with the hardware from the office to make a temporary arrangement for working from their home. These small steps can go a long way to build loyalty and win them over.

• Talk about challenges 

The challenge that an employee might face while working remotely is entirely different from what he or she might face when working on a premise. There is always an HR professional around for the former, but when it comes to working remotely they cannot just stand up and go to the HR room. This is where you as a manager need to step-in under the current scenario. 

While trying to make your team member feel comfortable, talk about the challenges he or she is facing. The challenges could range from being unable to concentrate amidst a homely environment to not having the right tools by their side to streamline work and more. Once you know the challenges help them find a solution. 

• Share their self-learning experiences

Once things are set up to start working, give them some time to get used to this working style. And, don’t forget to ask if they are doing fine. Offer them tips, if they are doing it for the first time. 

Try to have informal team conversations during breaks regularly, where members can share their experience of working from home. This can be a great way to know their self-learning experiences and spread them around. 

• Keep things normal

Most important of all, keeping things normal and maintaining a routine like your regular days is one of the best things you can do to keep your team at ease. When the team members will see that things are going like routine days, they are going to feel comfortable no matter they are working from their homes, PGs or anywhere else.

We, for instance, at ProofHub have regular real-time discussions and arrange our daily tasks like we used to while working together under the same roof. I am in constant contact with all the team members through ProofHub chat. And, in fact, we have set up workstations in the homes of our designing team to make sure that they continue to work productively without losing their productive time. 

As you can see, the points that I have mentioned are not really something extraordinary. These are some simple things that every leader can do to keep their team happy and functioning while facing this lockdown situation. Give them a try, and I’m sure you will be able to keep your team up and running like regular working days!

About Author:

Vartika Kashyap is the Chief Marketing Officer at ProofHub — leading project management software. From contributing to websites such as The Huffington Post, Bussiness.com, Elearning, Dzone, and The Next Web to becoming LinkedIn Top Voices in 2017 and 2018, she has recognised amazing new ways to reach the audience. She weaves stories about productivity, team building, work culture, leadership, and common workplace events. She also loves to read and travel to new places.