What do your employees need from you at this moment? With everything continuing to change rapidly there are ways we can best support our employees during any transition. Every company’s transition will look different, but the following tips can be helpful for all of us.
Know Your Abilities. Many people don’t really know their abilities – the things about them that can help them successfully navigate crisis or change. To lead them through developing an inventory of abilities use an online assessment or engage a coach. Make time to debrief the results and help employees see how to use their abilities. We are all more talented and capable than we know.
Shift the Mindset. Under continued stress, we stay in fight, flight, or freeze mode. Everything seems amplified and more difficult from this mindset so it is important to shift the mindset. Share with employees that this is normal in a period of extended stress and that most others are in this same situation.
Develop a Toolbox of Success Habits. This is where you can help your employees develop tangible actions that help them develop stamina and grit and how to improve their attitude.
Here are some options on how to improve your outlook and reduce stress:
- Develop a gratitude practice by starting and ending each day with a list of 5 things you are grateful for, including your abilities.
- Develop a practice to breathe deeply when you encounter a challenge (breathe in for a count of 4, hold it for a count of 4, breathe out for a count of 4.
- Develop a network of people (phone a friend) to check in on often.
- Develop a connection to nature. Nature delivers a 24 hour a day, 7 days a week distraction to shift out of the challenge and on to beauty.
- Exercise or do yoga to shift your mind off the stresses of the day and onto your health and wellbeing.
- Focus on a celebration or great time that has recently happened. Dream of how to do something like it again.
Consider developing a company initiative to address how to help employees stay upbeat, focused, and energized. After all, with several tools and some guidance, we can all discover that we are able to dig deeper and find that we are, as A.A. Milne shares in his famous quote, “braver than we believe, stronger than we seem and smarter than we think.”
Excerpts taken from Jay Forte’s Vistage Article “What employees don’t need from you in this moment”.