Take Good Care: How to nurture your team, yourself, and your connections in a time of quarantine

Article-55-Take-Good-Care

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If you want to accurately gauge how much something matters to people, all you have to do is to tell them that they’re not allowed to have it. The coronavirus pandemic has forced us into isolation and severely restricted our movement and interaction with other people. It’s also highlighting just how deeply we need and want to be around each other. 

This is showing us how important our relationships really are, how much it means to be able to see a friend face to face, to hug, to look into their eyes, and to laugh or cry with them in the same place and time. Now, for the time being, all of this will be done virtually or from a great distance. 

Here are a few tips for taking care of your team, yourself, and your professional connections during these trying times.

Take care of your team

Show your human side, including your emotions.
Society and corporate habits paint this idea that business leaders are supposed to be stoic, emotionless, and reserved at all times. But that makes you look like a robot, and it sets an expectation that other people on the team are supposed to show up that way too, especially if they want to get promoted. This disregards people’s humanity. Staff won’t feel safe bringing their whole selves to work if they perceive that parts of themselves will be rejected or unwelcome. The best boss I ever had showed up as a real person, with real feelings and emotions. She was able to project and expect excellence, while also revealing her humanness, hopes, fears, tears and ideals. The more you show up as a full person, the more you make the workspace a safe and inclusive space for your staff to show up as full people too.

Create and uphold a set of norms or agreements about how you will all engage with each other. 

This should be a small set of behaviors that you all agree to adopt in how you will and won’t behave towards each other. These agreements should prioritize respect, inclusivity, emotional wellbeing and safety. One of the best managers I ever had took this very seriously. She even had a “no sarcasm” rule, because she knows that many people grew up being teased and bullied, and that sarcastic put-down jokes have that tiny dagger in them, even when said in a joking way. She refused to let people on her team talk to each other that way and it created an incredibly safe environment. She took communication and kindness seriously, and made sure that we all did, too.

Create regular opportunities for your team to bond as regular people. 

It amuses (and saddens) me to see how so many companies think that hosting one expensive off-site a year will create a long-lasting and meaningful bond for their staff. Think about it: If you were in a relationship, would you expect a single weekend getaway to create all the trust and connection necessary for your relationship to stay healthy and strong all year long? Of course not, your connection must be worked on all the time, in small and large ways. 

The world of work is too often an experience in erasure — of our homes, our hearts, our family and friends, and the things that matter to us in our lives beyond performance reviews, OKRs and promotions. Nowadays, most of us are working from home and there’s only so much professional performance we can do when we’re surrounded by our real lives. And this is a good thing. Companies have been claiming they want their employees to bring their “whole selves” to work—and then failing to produce the conditions for that to occur. The upside of everyone working remotely is that we have no choice but to bring our whole selves to work, because we are at home where our whole selves and whole lives reside.

Research shows that employees experience higher feelings of belonging when their teammates know and accept them for who they really are. Office life rarely provides the conditions for authentic moments of self-disclosure and connection to spontaneously occur. But working remotely on teams that welcome us to share our home lives, does. Cultivate that kind of team.

Prevent burnout

When you do work that focuses on helping others, it can be easy to internalize their struggles and carry a chronically high stress level. Doing so increases the amount of cortisol and inflammation in your own body. So it’s important to have rituals for unplugging, compartmentalizing, and pushing stress hormones out of your body either through physical exertion, meditation, or an activity that you find stress-relieving like art, journaling, playing music, or gardening.

Three ways to strengthen your culture

  1. Rename “sick days” as “wellness days” and allow staff to use them for anything that benefits their health and wellbeing. It’s important to remember that health doesn’t just refer to our physical body. For the majority of my life I’ve rarely gotten sick, whereas other people I know seem to catch colds every other week. A person may be physically well but struggling with emotional or mental health challenges, which are of course, invisible. Workers dealing with emotional or mental health issues deserve the opportunity to use wellness days to care for their wellbeing without being stigmatized.

    Get to know your staff to understand their needs while respecting their privacy and boundaries. Treat all requests for wellness time equally. Monitor your language and assumptions to be sure that you don’t socially penalize people who use wellness days for non-physical needs. This often happens when a person says they need a sick day and someone else replies assumptively, “yeah I hear something’s been going around” (or in the current situation, assuming that the other person might have coronavirus). These assumptions subtly pressure the other person to claim that this is their reason for needing a day off. It’s no one’s business why someone wants to use a wellness day. It’s also a good idea to avoid making any comments that your staff member “doesn’t seem sick” when they say they need a wellness day; they might need the time to care for an invisible ailment, or their mental health. Treat all wellness efforts as valuable ones, because they are.

  2. Give your staff chances to cultivate colleague relationships that share the same qualities of healthy friendships: trust, belonging, true connection, personal expression, autonomy, mutuality, and feeling known for one really is. You can support this in a variety of ways, such as making thoughtful project assignments, giving teamwork exercises, and allowing a team to self-organize to solve any work-related problem of their choosing. Give accolades for a variety of achievements, such as depth of cooperation and most divergent thinking, instead of awarding singular individuals who “beat the others out” by excelling in well-trod territory.

     

  3. Invite your staff to share their invisible strengths. Our work careers last for years, and along the way, we pick up many talents and abilities that may exceed the demands of our current jobs. Those gifts still exist, even when they’re not being actively used and they help make us who we are. Our jobs can often be such a one-dimensional experience where we’re only known for the single job description that we got hired for. So create ways for your staff to learn about each others’ work histories. This can be over a team lunch, or as a highlight portion of a weekly team huddle agenda.

Take care of yourself

Cultivate your connection to yourself

When we are surrounded by stories that remind us of the precious fleeting experience of being alive, remember that you are on this earth for a reason. Take quiet time to connect to your core sense of being. When you’re overwhelmed by the news, turn it off for a while and let yourself appreciate the fact that if you’re even reading the news, it means that you’re alive. Cherish that fact.

Cultivate your connection to others 

I really wish that the health officials who came up with the term “social distancing” had used the more accurate term “physical distancing” instead since that’s what they’re referring to when they say to stay more than 6’ away from other people. It’s crucial that in our most challenging times (pandemic, for example), that we maintain strong social and emotional bonds with others. If you’ve neglected the relationships that matter to you, now more than ever is the time to nurture them. Give people your attention from a distance via phone calls, video calls, written cards and letters. When you have conversations, be sure that you don’t only talk about the worst of the news. Learn new things about each other, such as your fondest memories and biggest dreams. Make sure people know how much they mean to you.

Cultivate your connection to the world

One of my favorite ways to do this is by observing nature, from the very large to the ultra tiny. If you can get outside to a patch of nature safely, observe as much about it as you can: the sounds, creatures, and growing things. Paying attention to nature when I’m feeling overwhelmed always helps to calm down my racing heart and exhale the stress in my body. It helps me appreciate my own life and all life on our planet. Consider for a moment that in this very moment, you are held in place by a perfect dose of gravity on a planet whose atmosphere is the exact kind you need to stay alive, in a solar system whose sun is the exact distance away that it grows every kind of food you need to sustain your entire lifetime—and all of this happens for free with no effort of your own. Acknowledging this miracle can bring enormous feelings of grace, calm, and wonder—if we pause long enough to take them in.

Take a wider perspective

Allow yourself plenty of breaks from the news. Give yourself the gift of occasionally putting your mind on something else. Choose any other subject that will give your brain a much needed break. One method that helps me keep perspective in scary geopolitical times is reading about history. Not just recent history, such as the events of the last hundred years or so, but deep history. I love to read about the history of the earth, dinosaurs, the solar system, and humans who were alive hundreds or thousands of years ago. Taking a long view at the passing of time helps me accomplish the next step, accepting impermanence.

Accept that everything is impermanent

Nothing lasts forever. Not that itch on our nose that we’re trying not to scratch, not this pandemic, not our lives, not even our solar system (our sun is only likely to last another five billion years or so). None of this will last forever. That’s ok. That’s how it was always meant to be.

Take care of your professional connections

Be real

Now is not the time to send emails that completely ignores the coronavirus situation. At the same time, you don’t want to go overboard, like in this tweet from @_chismosa_ below.

When reaching out to professional contacts, double your normal levels of honesty and empathy. It’s possible that the other person or someone they love may be dealing with serious illness or overwhelm so approach them more gently than usual so you don’t come across as cold and transactional. For example “Hey Mary, I hope this email finds you and your loved ones safe and healthy. I know this is a challenging time for everyone so I just wanted to let you know I’m thinking of you. If you’re well and open to having a conversation about [the business thing], I’m available at [XYZ dates and times]. I completely understand if you need to postpone for the time being, just let me know what works for you. Wishing you all the best, Kat.”

Be of service

If you’re creating a new resource or option that is relevant to supporting people during the pandemic, offer it widely. This is a time for generosity, kindness, and sharing resources. I did this recently by hosting a support call for my fellow speakers and facilitators who’ve been impacted by the widespread cancellation of conferences and gatherings. 

In the support call, I focused on providing four things: a chance for people to share the impacts and emotions of the pandemic on their work life; the chance to share how they are leaning into new opportunities that have emerged from this moment; the invitation to commit to a specific piece of self-care; the chance to make an offering or contribute a resource to the other people on the call. I recorded the video and put it on Youtube so that any other speakers and facilitators who could benefit that kind of support can access it in the future. Where can you show up for your colleagues with a spirit of kindness and generosity? How can you use your resources to help carry others forward?

Stay inside, stay safe, and support each other. Together, we’ll get through this. To chat more about any of these ideas, or if I can be of service, feel free to reach me at kat@weshouldgettogether.com; learn more about my work at katvellos.com or weshouldgettogether.com.

Author: Kat Vellos

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