When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Amidst the ongoing pandemic of Covid 19 that is wreaking havoc businesses globally, organizations endure the hardships and Leaders/Managers must help their team/employees to stay engaged, focus and motivated.

Moreover, every individual managed stress differently. Therefore, Leaders/Managers need to take more on a personal approach and further find out what needs of them to stay on track as well as providing good support. Here are some of the tips that’d be beneficial to consider:

1. Keep Your Door Open, Communicate Better: Employees may need frequent assurances on these hard times. Therefore, give them access to your time and be honest with them. Don’t be evasive or promise anything that you cannot fulfil. Be genuine, yet also let them know that there are things that you cannot further discuss because it’s just straight cannot or perhaps in better times.
2. Keep Your Own Worries To Yourself: As a Leader/Manager you have two challenging tasks: empathize with employees and deal with your own stress. It is imperative to keep your feelings private since your own apprehensions may panic employees.
3. Plan Ahead: Set short term goals with achievable expectations that you and your employee can together keep a good track upon (especially on doing WFH). With this, you can keep the productivity alive especially on facing such hardship times and also boast employees morale. You can do this by:
4. Scheduling Via Online Meetings: When will you be online? When do you expect your employees/team to be online? Does your team have set working hours?
5. Establishing Working Rhythm: How will your team receive tasks and how do you determine the urgent tasks that take priority? How are those communicated?
6. Feedback: How will you provide feedback and at what frequency?
7. Praise & Recognize Their Hard Works: You understood their stress, yet they still provide you good work with good results and strong commitment. Therefore, you need to seal the deal with positive recognition and appreciation. You can do this by simply emailing them appreciative notes. Yes! Simple, yet very personal. This will strengthen more of their morale and definitely their trust in you as a leader, especially within such hardship. Basically, they will see you not only as a great and trustworthy leader, but also they see themselves as a strong & solid team that can still manage to provide the best result against such high stress and in such limited workspace.
8. Don’t forget To Praise Yourself As Well: Leaders/Manager, yet we are all still humans. The benefits of self-praise are that praise raises.