Staying Connected While You Are Disconnected

…and what to do next for your Organization’s Health

Having been in Europe for Spring Break last week with my family, we experienced the rise of panic that came from the latest news.  When we set the plan last year to go to Switzerland in early March, we had dreams of driving to Northern Italy to our favorite small town there, Aosta, to have amazing gnocchi and drive through Chamonix, France via the Tunnel du Mont Blanc (which was the world’s longest tunnel when it opened in 1965 at 7.2 miles long).  However, before we landed in Switzerland, that was already off the table.

On Sunday, March 8th everything started to change.  A dear friend in Switzerland, who we were with, is an executive for a very large multinational company.  His company decided to issue a mandatory work from home policy.  All of the sudden, their work environment was upended.  Projects, priorities and the norm of daily efforts were no longer possible without major shifts.  Shortly thereafter, our week of vacation became upended.

There's nothing like a major disruption to help us implement the things we have needed to do.

We are back in the U.S. and healthy, thank God.  Like many of you, we too are self-imposing a quarantine, not for fear or panic, but to ultimately help to curb this quickly.  We want to do our part, but then we realize the criticality of human interaction.  It's not just this virus that has started remote working.  Working from home has been trending upwards for many years.

How do we adjust while everyone is working from home?

1. Be flexible and open.

   • What has been on the backburner that you now have time for?

   • Take the pressure of current timelines off -- everything is moving slower and there is little to be done for that in the short term.  Reset expectations on all fronts (staff, employees, board members, clients), so they know they are in this with you.

2. Stay connected regularly.

   • Zoom, Skype, WebEx, FaceTime with your team as much as possible.  Don't just make phone calls. We need to see each other to remember we are still part of a team.

   • Don't operate solely through email and text.  Consider trying Loom to communicate essential messages instead.

3. Meet frequently and make space for creativity

   • Keep a Daily "Stand-up" meeting and consider extending it. A tool like Zoom can make that connection easy (I have no commercial interest in Zoom). Extend your discussions using a sample agenda like this one:

     • What are you thankful for today?

     • What is the top priority for today?

     • Who needs help of any kind?

   • Keep your Weekly Tactical meetings in place.  While you may be slowing down, keeping this can help you advance the critical items in this period.

4. Limit viewing of news sites and social media to protect your mind.  As I wrote last month, the invisible space in our minds is where leaders excel. News and Social Media have the potential to get our eyeballs locked on fear that should be tempered and controlled.

When we are unprepared for the “rock and a hard place,” it can bring out the best in us.  If we keep ourselves from overplaying our fears and keep our teams full of hope, we will see new opportunities appear.  The best of innovation and new ideas are born by keeping concerns from playing an ever-present part in thinking.  Moreover, some of the best ideas come from the disruption of the unplanned.

In spite of the disruption, we had one of the most memorable vacations of our lives!  As parents, we notified our sons early that we might have to make changes but that we were not worried.  We squelched our complaining to make sure that we would not spoil the opportunity to get the most out of the situation.
 
When the announcements were made that Europe was closing while we slept, we woke that morning and caught the first flight to London.   We were rebuffed from immediately flying home and given the first flight available which was not until Saturday morning.  This left us with 48 hours to see London (with tons of soap, water and hand sanitizer…that we came to Europe with lots of). 
 
I could show you the pictures – it was a fantastic trip.  For this outcome, it required flexibility, a welcoming of surprises, and vigilance (we almost had to tie our hands to our belts to keep from touching our faces).  We are not out of the woods yet, but a doom and gloom outlook will only make this season of uncertainty much worse

Our teams need our leadership to keep a highly functioning, low fear, high hope culture in these days ahead!