Maintaining Staff Morale During COVID-19
Speaking about the impact of COVID-19 on our personal and professional lives, at this point, has become redundant. We’ve lived in the disaster movie-Esque, lockdown hellscape long enough now to know precisely how it affects each and every one of us.
Simply put, maintaining staff morale through C-19 has been a nightmare for many organizations, multiple far-reaching surveys have found that this dip in morale is an issue for more than half of global employers. Whether you realise it or not, it’s extremely likely that many of your employees are suffering from low morale. So, what practical steps can you take to address this problem?
Don’t Let Accomplishments Slip Away Un-Noticed:
Short, Medium and Long-term plans have been cast by the wayside for most businesses over the past year. In many cases, organizations had to focus on simply surviving. Of course, your team understands the situation you’re in, so maintaining positivity around and recognition of accomplishments is vital in boosting morale. This may mean pivoting from your pre-existing goals, actively searching for COVID-Friendly milestones and making sure to acknowledge them when they happen.
A wonderful way to work out what you should be celebrating is by setting 1 to 1 meetings with your team, asking them which of their achievements meant the most to them over the past year. This immediately highlights any discrepancy between what you value and what your employees' value. If a discrepancy exists here, it needs to be addressed as it will decay your team’s morale.
Encourage Flexibility:
This can be a divisive point as keeping regular communication and consistency across working hours is a highly effective way to increase morale and connectivity while working remotely. That said, C-19 is a remote working situation like none other before it.
With school closures and enforced lockdown, the barriers between home and professional lives have crumbled. For any of your staff with children, it may be a necessity to work flexibly whether that is starting early or finishing late, it is vital you accommodate this request. It may be difficult to manage for a period but it’s much easier to manage than finding a replacement for a skilled team-mate should your inflexibility force them to leave.
Give Your Staff the Tools they Need:
If your team has been forced to work remotely without it already being an option, the chances are, your organization doesn’t have the tools you need to function properly. The lone beauty of C-19 forcing the remote working hand is that we are living in a period where almost too much software exists.
Don’t simply sign up for Microsoft Teams, check that box and walk away. There are so many iterations of work management software, communications platforms, CRM systems, the list goes on. Whatever niche problem you’re facing, there’s likely a solution tailor-made for your exact issue – and it’s just a Google search away. It’s vital to speak to your employees to work out what elements of their positions have become untenable due to the remote working switch and actively search for a solution to that problem.
Getting bogged down, spending hours on workarounds to previously simple operations is a major driver of dissatisfaction and low morale. If these are issues for your organization, they need to be addressed.
Encourage Virtual Meetings (And Don’t Make Them About Work):
The social aspect of work is something we are all deeply missing because of C-19. As an employer it’s hard not to stay focused on the bottom line, ensuring efficiency and effectiveness are maintained. That said, it’s undeniable that a big part of why we enjoy going to work is to interact with our colleagues when we get there. After all, we spend more time interacting with our colleagues daily than our own families.
Ideas like virtual beers, virtual coffee breaks or similar social events are a great way to navigate this void of social interaction many people are experiencing. As the title would suggest though, the purpose of these events is to avoid talking about work. It should be a fun, relaxed environment wherein everyone can catch up with friends, share some funny lockdown-related anecdotes and just relax.
These types of social meetings remind employees why they love working at your company, it brings them closer to their team-mates and straps a rocket to your team’s morale.