It’s a particularly difficult and confusing time to be a person right now, especially when you’re a person who also happens to be an HR professional. Your company leaders and teammates alike are looking for you to set the tone of how seriously or lightly they should respond to COVID19. It’s essential that your response to the circumstances is calm and constructive.
Once you’ve squared away the (literal) house-keeping of work-from-home logistics for your team, maintaining morale is the next item on HR’s to-do list. The word “morale” in and of itself brings up a lot of positive associations to things like laughter, team outings, heart-to-hearts, etc.; a degree of lightheartedness that doesn’t feel appropriate at this time despite it being more important than ever.
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To strike the right balance of authenticity and comfort to boost morale within your org, we suggest the following.
Maintain Open Channels of Communication
Lean on your tools of internal communication, our favorite is Slack, to keep your team connected. Make sure the communication is coming from all angles too, not just from the top. Giving your employees the appropriate forum to chat casually in, like our #breakroom Slack channel, allows everyone to know what’s going on in the lives of their coworkers without clogging up the feeds of business-only channels.
Transparent messaging from leadership is important, but the relationship between manager and employee is even more important. When managers share how they’re really feeling and encourage their team members to be honest about where they are mentally in this new world trust is built, empathy grows, and morale is boosted because they know they’re not alone. We suggest that managers start (or continue) to conduct regular check-ins with their direct reports that go beyond 1:1s and enter the territory of dedicated productivity meetings, and yes, even just-for-fun hangouts!
Spoiler alert: The latter is where morale is born.
On the subject of fun, it’s critical to your company’s morale that you keep having it. Virtual happy hours (or coffee dates), exercise (we love doing planks), mindfulness breaks, and even an additional 5 minutes at the beginning and end of meetings to chat are all good places to start.
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Err on the Side of Caution, Not Fear
When it comes to making the tough calls, like advising your employees to work from home, the “why” behind your decision should be one of cautiousness and respect for your employees, not fear or panic. Again, you set the emotional tone.
Company morale is in part built on the employee’s trust for their company, so a smooth transition from working at work to work from home (WFH) is critical. Make sure you set them up for success with the right tools, take the time to share best practices, and remember that you don’t have to have all of the answers (crowdsourcing from experts in your company is just as effective).
Take advantage of the technology available to you to help your teams be productive, we’d be lost without Slack, Zoom, and PandaDoc.
Given the prevalence of COVID-19, training for teams on resilience, mindfulness & managing through a crisis is no longer a nice-to-have. Your team has no past experiences to draw on unless they were alive during the plague or Spanish Flu. Remember that this is a new experience for everyone and any training your company can offer to help employees navigate through the uncertainty is priceless.
Rally Around Hope
The final piece that has helped us at PandaDoc during this time, is that we quickly rallied around a product roadmap plan to create a free version of our eSignature technology.
Rallying your troops around something meaningful, when so many people are struggling, is a powerful thing. It doesn’t have to be directly related to your business either. It could be as simple as donating the money your company has saved from not having team lunches to a food shelter or hospital. You could encourage team members ways to give back through an “organize your closet day” where they put aside clothing to donate to charity.
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