Tips For Helping Your Employees, over the past 18 months, the covid-19 pandemic has created a world of uncertainty as it is hard to predict when the pandemic will end and when things such as lockdowns and social distancing will become a thing of the past.
Feeling secure, safe, and happy is a vital human need and desire. Here are some tips that aim to help your employees feel secure during periods of uncertainty.
Tips For Helping Your Employees: Normalise Feelings In The Workplace
People often have expectations of what their emotions should or shouldn’t be. It is important to accept that humans feel a broad range of different emotions and whatever a person is feeling it is okay as different life situations bring out different emotions in different types of people.
In many cases when we place expectations on how our emotions should or shouldn’t be there, or we try to pretend they are not there, we start to place a screen between our true self and the one we present to each other. This screen not only interferes with our communication, but it takes up a great amount of our energy and can be very tiring.
Our emotions will in most cases pass through us quicker if we allow them the space to be. Normalising the expression of them, the range of them, and having conversations about how we are feeling is part of allowing ourselves to be human in a complex world. Role model how comfortable you are with this conversation by expressing your own feelings, for example, “I’m feeling this emotion today. How are you feeling?”
By doing this you will begin to get a more transparent, open, and honest perspective on how people are feeling, and that is so important to you as a leader. Making room to ask “how are you?” and then double-clicking into “so, really how are you?” is a simple way to show empathy and connection and will result in deeper levels of trust.
Tips For Helping Your Employees: Prepare For Uncertainty, As Opposed To Preparing For Certainty
A common misconception about feeling secure is that we should pretend that everything is OK when we don’t know that it will be; clear when everything is not clear; controllable when everything is not controllable.
Generally speaking most people look to leaders to provide security, but given the uncertainty, it is important to include a healthy amount of transparency to what we can and what we can’t control. For example, we may want to provide a plan of action on something, however due to the changing states of play, we might need to remind people that the plan is dependent on x, y, z. We should also try our best to ensure people in your organization that you have back-up plans should the state change, providing security to people that we are preparing for uncertainty, rather than preparing for certainty.
Tips For Helping Your Employees: Create Courageous Conversations
When humans choose to approach important and sensitive conversations with courage and kindness, we allow for deep connection, trust and joy. In small businesses, the working team are implicitly connected and reliant on each other. Spending time focusing on the “real” conversations means that we must at times be able to bring elephants into the room rather than allow for us to have our head in the sand. Allowing politeness on the surface but frustrations under the radar makes for difficulty. Uncertainty demands that we are capable of having challenging conversations safely. This is a learnable skill and one that leaders have a responsibility to develop.
Our performance as a business relies on how we work collectively. Our strategy for surviving uncertainty must focus on how we help our people feel secure.
