8 Ways to Manage Your Team While Social Distancing

 

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Timothy R. Clark for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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The Covid-19 virus has disrupted and rearranged the workplace with breathtaking speed. In the span of a week, organizations across every sector have sent millions of employees home to work remotely. Without warning — and in many cases, without preparation of any kind — managers have been thrust into the position of leading virtual teams, many for the first time.

It’s challenging enough to manage yourself in quarantine without face-to-face human interaction and the structure of a typical workday. Now add to that the task of managing a team under those conditions, especially when you’ve never done it before. It’s daunting.

Pressurized conditions, heightened uncertainty, and an overall sense of dislocation make it even more difficult. Under quarantine, every aspect of the manager’s role is magnified and complicated. You’ll need to reset expectations for how work gets done and adapt your management style to a new context.

To help managers who are new to this — or even experienced managers who need additional guidance in these trying times — here are my best recommendations for supporting continued learning and the emotional well-being of your employees.

[Here are the first three recommendations.]

Reset your expectations. Most teams are socialized and accustomed to synchronous work and standardization. They work together, located in the same office, under the same working conditions, with the same work schedule. In a quarantined environment, managers must help their teams shift immediately to asynchronous work and personalization. You’ll need to reset expectations for how work gets done, letting go of when and how tasks are accomplished, allowing team members to accomplish their responsibilities on their own terms. This means focusing on results and offering more flexibility.

Stay in regular touch. Sociometric research proves that shorter communication cycle times are more effective in building and sustaining morale and engagement. Use instant messaging to stay in regular contact. Don’t let an employee go half a day without checking in. You might want to hold a huddle each day, ideally by video, perhaps rotating responsibility for who leads it. Set the expectation that everyone be present and not distracted. Model what it means to show up as a virtual team player.

Support continued learning but keep it short. Learning doesn’t have to stop in this new environment, but it may be more practical to use microlearning. Focus on sharing short lessons on a single topic in a five to 10-minute segment. These might cover a specific tool, behavior, or skill. Rotate the delivery of these lessons among team members and allow them to identify their own topics for training. You might ask a different team member to debrief the lesson and lead a short discussion about the application, relevance, and implications of what everyone learned.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Timothy R. Clark is founder and CEO of LeaderFactor, a global leadership consulting and training firm. He is the author of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation (Berrett-Koehler 2020).

 

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