These are testing times for everybody, all over the world. All businesses, small, medium and even large, are facing massive disruption due to this coronavirus disease COVID-19. The last quarter of the financial year 2019-2020 for Indian companies (which is the first quarter of the financial year 2020-21 for some international companies) saw unprecedented erosion of shareholders’ wealth and demand-supply situation. ‘
COVID-19 has changed the way of doing business for almost everyone in the world! Many nations have gone into a state of complete lockdown, forcing private sector companies to allow their employees to work from home WFH, wherever possible and completely shut their operations where WFH was not a possibility.
Uncertainty, fear, grief, pain are the only emotions spreading along with the virus! The world is facing a catastrophe and the world leaders are trying their best to manage this COVID-19 crisis!
From the Presidents and Prime Ministers to the owners of a small business, all leaders are trying to play a similar role – a role of helping their people fight this COVID-19 pandemic and to emerge victoriously!
“Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gain confidence, seeing how you react. If you’re in control, they’re in control.” – Tom Landry
7 Tips for Leaders to contain the negative impact of the COVID-19 crisis
1. Caring for the health and safety of employees and their families
The leaders need to ensure the safety of their employees, especially those who are travelling for business and stuck in a foreign city or those who are staying away from their home town and families. They need to assign an HR person to sensitise all the employees to follow the Government issued guidelines – Sanitize, wash your hands regularly and stay at home to stay safe during the outbreak of COVID-19.
The leaders should allow their employees and project teams to work from homes (remote locations) wherever possible. This is an essential step towards reducing employee stress levels and maintaining business continuity.
2. Preserving the mental health of everybody
Coping with coronavirus anxiety, uncertainty and fear of loss of livelihood and catching the disease is putting a lot of stress on people. The leaders can create a support group led by the HR and a mental health professional to help avoid the panic in their employees who are either working from their homes or are on leaves.
3. Maintaining internal team morale
Team building activities, staying connected, organizing virtual all-hands meetings, starting some fun sessions, conducting upskilling and refresher training workshops are some of the activities that can be organized virtually with the help of technology tools.
Leaders should encourage such events to keep the teams motivated during social distancing and WFM.
4. Navigating through uncertain business externalities
Leaders need to do a lot of rethinking their business models and strategies to mitigate the risk of major revenue and profit losses.
We have designed a questionnaire for the leaders to think through the business continuity during this coronavirus pandemic. You can access the free questionnaire here – Business continuity questionnaire for leaders
5. Making hard decisions
Not all decisions are favourable to all employees and leaders need to make these decisions in time so that the long term business remains viable.
Communication of these hard decisions needs to be managed skilfully though!
6. Handling personal and professional stress
One can not forget that ultimately leaders are also affected by this COVID-19 pandemic along with all the employees. Moving to WFH has blurred the boundaries of office hours and personal time. And this is especially true for all business leaders. They have to battle on personal and professional fronts at a time.
Leaders need to do practice stress-relieving techniques such as Yoga, meditation and spend some quality time with their families, play indoor games with kids. If they remain in good health, they will be able to lead better!
7. Risk of going into micromanaging teams
During the last three months since the first case of COVID-19 in China, the world has undergone a lot of changes and experienced uncertainties. The operation models and business models have changed, the survival of many companies has become a question mark. All this has brought the leaders on edge and they are taking radical measure to cope and survive and do disaster management.
This much uncertainty can make the leaders micromanage all teams and making them less productive instead of helping. This can stem from a lack of visibility into the real-time project data and the team input and productivity metrics.
To avoid micromanaging remote teams, leaders can use project management tools such as Whizible, which facilitate remote team management using the SaaS-enabled online software for projects, timesheet and real-time Dashboards.
Whizible helps reduce the stress of managing diverse projects from remote locations!
