How Companies Can Lead Better in the Time of COVID-19

I recently read a post that struck me. It looked like this:

Ironically it’s taken a pandemic to lead the biggest, widest and fastest digital transformation that we have ever seen. Suddenly it doesn’t matter if we were prepared to go digital, or if we had all the necessary frameworks in place to afford to work from home. All that matters now is — what is the quickest way to do it?

At BusyBuds, we conducted interviews with employees from various organisations to understand what some of their company’s initiatives and priorities are in this forced ‘work from home’ scene. The most obvious is that organisations are leveraging heavily on digital platforms.

Although we learned, it’s a lot more than that. Keep reading to find out.

HEALTH IS A PRIORITY

The most important shift that has happened since the pandemic is that organisations are now caring for and focusing more on employees’ health and safety. The result:

1. This consideration has never been so high up on the company priority list and on such a drastic scale before.
2. Looking beyond just employee health, organisations have started to assess their own ‘organisational health’, i.e. whether their business can be sustainable and profitable after this.
3. In a recent interview on HardTalk, Daimler CEO Ola Källenius specifically referred to the fact that they are considering the “health of the company” by taking measures to protect and manage cash. But does organisational health go beyond just financial management? That’s a topic all on its own and BusyBuds will be sure to cover it.

WORKSPACE MATTERS

The next thing that we are seeing are organisations showing different forms of support for their employees to set up home workspaces. These include:

1. offering monetary incentives to purchase items;
2. providing laptops, office chairs and extra monitors for the employee to set up their own home office; and
3. providing internet connectivity support.

Beyond just giving an employee the essential tools to work with, employers are coming to understand that it is also important to care about employee comfort at work. Put it this way, you may not NEED an extra monitor but it sure would be BETTER to have one when you need to do your work, and some companies understand that.

In the past a lot of companies understood the importance of creating a conducive work environment and they provided creative & ergonomic office spaces. Today the question is — what can organisations do when the boundaries of your company office space now extend to each employee’s unique home?

REFRAMING THE MEANING OF PRODUCTIVITY

Organisations are at the same time trying to learn how to manage productivity of employees albeit the fact that they can no longer see or engage with employees as readily as before. Here are some interesting productivity tracking & enhancement measures taken by some organisations:

1. turning ‘good morning’ messages on whatsapp into a way of checking in with your team and letting everyone know you’re ready for work;
2. taking away the pressure of performing under these abnormal circumstances by giving everyone an “exceeds expectations” rating for their quarterly performance reviews; and
3. creating timesheets which refer to goals instead of tasks.

When I heard the story of the organisation that was boosting all its employee’s performance ratings for the quarter, it was surprisingly delightful to discover that all this did for the employee was boost his enthusiasm to work harder for the company and continue to serve at a level of excellence. Proving that rewards are not everything, but appreciation and gratitude can go a long way.

AVENUES FOR SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

Now let’s consider the average office employee. With a 9 hour work day on average (including those lunch breaks we so enjoy), we spend about 45 hours of our week at work. With that much time spent in one place with the same people, it’s no wonder we create some of our meaningful human connections there. Organisations are showing that they recognize this and how much it contributes to the lives and mental health of their employees by encouraging this to continue during the ‘work from home’ situation with initiatives such as:

1. regular group workout sessions via zoom calls;
2. team lunches spent together over their computer screens; and
3. after work huddles to talk about only non-work related stuff or play games together and catch up.

But does everyone really participate and engage in these sessions? We have the answer to that below.

LEADERS ON THE GROUND

Yes, employees do participate and engage in these sessions most especially when they feel like there is top down support for these initiatives. We spoke to two different people who were experiencing this kind of support and this is what they had to share:

1. In the case of the first, it was weekly live Q&A sessions that their CEO & COO engage in worldwide with all their people. Apparently these kinds of interactions have been taking place even before the whole COVID-19 crisis and it made the employee feel like having an “open door” policy was more than just a saying, the company actually lived it.
2. Meanwhile in the case of the second individual, she mentioned that a lot of the company social initiatives were almost always attended by their Country Lead. Wait, their Country Lead was joining in on the weekday morning Zumba sessions too? What’s your excuse not to join?

So while the activities may be peer initiated, it is that top down support that makes a big difference to employee sentiment.

CONCLUSION

The big takeaway from this experience and sharing for me personally, is that today the human element is more important than ever to build organisational resilience and sustainability. With current conditions we are forced to face the realities of how much it impacts our business. By investing time and money into your organisation’s people, you are creating value incubators for your venture, which then multiplies your organisation’s potential gains.

The article & the insights within have been collaboratively assembled by Arif Ahmed, Kathleen Fernandez & Isabell Melvin partners at BusyBuds Co an organisational growth consultancy firm specialising in the spheres of human, data & design.