As we land into a new year, all of us are finding ourselves still grappling with a pandemic that has changed many things already, and continues to be unpredictable in its impact on our personal and working lives. When you think of how much you have adapted in the past two years, you may find that you have accommodated more change and uncertainty than any previous time in your life. Your resilience may have been tested and re-tested.
Whether you are a team leader or a member of a working team, you may still be feeling disconnected and isolated, and yet still have no certainty about your working rhythm and indeed your working location (office, home or a combination of both) in this coming year.
This week in the Australian Financial Review I read: Victorians are set to stay working from home for the foreseeable future, with the state’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton saying he has no intention of changing current recommendations to work remotely “at this point in time”.
With this uncertainty, it is vital that remote working leaders and their teams re-connect much more strongly as you enter the 3rd year of pandemic precautions and practicalities. The following are 3 critical connections that must now be priorities:
Connecting with Purpose
Team Leaders need to reconnect each and every one of their team members with their individual purpose and the overall purpose of the team. This may have easily been lost in the past two years as the focus was on simply keeping going throughout the pandemic and the work-from-home realities. In moving towards a hybrid working model where some team members will be in the office some of the time, and other team members will be working from home, a strong sense of purpose will be crucial for both individual motivation and whole team effectiveness.
Connecting with Career
Career conversations may also have been postponed in the past 12 – 24 months. With so much upheaval in home and working environments, including children’s education, team members may not have had the time to think about their career development and next career steps, whilst team leaders may not have taken time to schedule meaningful conversations for each of their employees.
Connecting with Fun
We know that team bonding is elevated when faced with challenges that are fun and rewarding. Many teams have missed their annual team days and group celebrations, or they may have been significantly pared down to fit into a remote working model. As we enter our third year of working remotely and more flexibly, connecting with fun will be something that can no longer be given minimal attention. Scheduling team bonding events is now a high priority.
Conversations are the most powerful way for team leaders to connect with their team members, however they must be planned and executed with a high level of commitment. That means not simply scheduling a quick online meeting where one or both parties leave their webcam off and attempt to keep the conversation at a surface or very practical level.
It means scheduling a dedicated period of time, setting expectations that it will be a deep and meaningful conversation, with shared purpose and a planned approach. There must be time and tolerance for discussing some big fleshy questions, being ok with some silences as both people process their thoughts. There must be a drive towards outcomes, not just acknowledging that it was a ‘good chat’.
And we must stop apologising for not being able to be ‘face-to-face’ or ‘in-person’. We must stop minimising the power of conversations that occur via webcam and stop waiting for some unspecified time in the future when we will all be back in the same room at the same time.