In our article, Five Steps to Sustainable Leadership, we looked at the need for maintaining leadership energy. But what about sustainable positivity in your team?

Around the world, people are bouncing between anxiety and relief.

Relief that lock-down rules are relaxing, that there is a genesis of return to work, that people can meet and look each other in the face, and that we can go out for more than an hour.

But this is tempered by the inevitable anxiety of travelling, being exposed to less distance-compliant people, adhering to distance in offices. For some, there is the looming fact of cost cutting measures impacting on job-security and concerns that prolonged home-working for reasons of safety or family will disadvantage their career. The potential for team morale dropping is significant.

The return to office work is going to be fraught with leadership challenges – of which more in coming articles – but what can leaders so right now to keep their team positive?

1.       Communicate. The quickest method for inducing stress in a team is to put them in fast moving change, with no direction, no clarity and high levels of ambiguity. Pretty much what many businesses are creating right now. Working across sectors I see significant differences between leadership teams who are giving clear and detailed guidelines for return to work and those who are saying it is ‘personal choice.’ We need to remember that we are often leading high achieving perfectionists – and telling them to make a guess leads to one question in their minds – ‘What will I get wrong?’

2.       Respond. You are likely to be already getting many difficult questions coming your way. ‘How will it work?’ ‘Do I need to come to the office every day?’ ‘Is my job safe?’ ‘Is my salary safe?’ All difficult and often with no straight answer. But respond with honesty – say what you know (as long as this does not mean dipping below the leadership line) and be clear when there no answer yet.

3.       Publish the plan. Most businesses have a strategy for returning to work. But how will it impact on your team. What will it look like? What will people need to do? Communicate early and avoid the shock of sudden change. Lifestyles and working styles have adapted and they will not snap back to the old ways like elastic. Plans give focus and time to re-adapt.

4.       Sustain visibility. Yes, you are camera weary – we all are. But a common reaction to hearing something is coming to an end is to stop doing what was effective in getting you to that end point. Over the past months, teams have adapted and achieved through technology and learned the importance of being visible to each other.  If leaders suddenly stop running team meetings on camera, there will be a rapid reduction in communication and team spirit. Keep the camera on until we are all back in the office – and that will likely be many months ahead.

5.       Stay busy. People are at their most insecure when they do not have enough to do.  Keep the workflow going even if it is not money generating. Your team members can still contribute though projects which were shelved due to time, upgrading your offering, making plans for upturn – involve them in making the new normal a better place.

Next article will look at supporting people in un-lock anxiety.