A simple yet so powerful question
The COVID-19 outbreak has faced employers with a need of a fast reaction to an unprecedented disruption in business, as well as a need to protect employees’ health and security in the workplace. Healthy employees are crucial to their companies.
Strong leadership is the key success factor to any organization. During times of crisis, employees look up even more for guidance, security, and support. Clear, transparent and continuous communication are more than ever required.
Mental well-being has become even more important nowadays. Checking in individually with teams is the best way to show presence and support. Genuinely caring and being present for every single team member, will definitely make the difference. For some people assistance will be more on an emotional level, for others the work-life balance might be a challenge, not to mention the potential financial challenges related to salary reductions or worse, forced unemployment.
Team conversations won’t be enough, an individual and personalized approach is required to support each employee in the best possible way. Coaching, for example, can be a very useful as it can help engage, support and empower individuals and teams to overcome the obstacles and challenging circumstances during these unpredictable times. An investment which does not only support the now, but also prepares for the after.
Each person reacts differently to a crisis. It’s an individual experience which brings up a variety of emotions from which some of the most common are: anxiety, anger, grief, depression and frustration.
The first step is to acknowledge the emotion, meaning to name it for what it is. Emotions are neither good or bad, it’s what we make out of them that turns them into a so called “positive” or “negative” emotion. So, recognizing our emotions and naming them allows us to acknowledge them for what they are and then we can decide what we want to do about them. A useful tool could, for example be to journal your emotions on a daily base; to see how your emotions come and go at different moments of the day. You might recognize some patterns which lead you to be feeling those recurring emotions.
Understanding what triggers our emotions is as important as the emotion itself; because again, if we know what triggers our “anger” or “anxiety” for example; we can find ways to better handle them; in view to eventually letting them go.
Recognizing and acknowledging our emotions is a vital skill, especially in times of crisis. If you haven’t given this much thought; you might want to get started as everybody has
his unique way of processing emotions. Without understanding what you’re feeling; it will be difficult to know what you’ll need to be able to move forward.
Having leaders prepared to talk about emotions with their employees is therefore very important nowadays. However, this requires being aware of the importance of emotions in the first place and being prepared to talk about them in a workplace environment.
A way to get started could simply be to ask “how are you?” but not asking for the sake of asking, really genuinely listening to the answer with all your senses. Noticing when the words say “I’m ok” but the non-verbal communication shows signs of “I’m not ok”; be there for this person and mirror him back what you see and feel. This will open a meaningful space for a caring conversation. A space allowing for emotions to be recognized and named. A very liberating exercise as such, especially when dealing with anger and anxiety for example.
So, how are you?
Pilar Cabral Majerović is an executive business coach and trainer with more than 20 years of vast managerial experience, holding a range of commercial and costumer related positions, in international environment.