Helping leaders and their teams transition to a post-pandemic workplace
To navigate this challenging time, leaders will need to create emotionally safe workplaces where employees are comfortable asking questions,
Returning to normal operations post-pandemic is challenging for many businesses. As they have done all year, they are leaning on their HR leaders and teams to guide them on the journey from pandemic crisis to thriving in their new world.
HR teams are working night and day to identify solutions for multiple and varied situations, from challenges associated with creating a hybrid workforce to figuring out the personnel management concerns related to economic uncertainty. Most importantly, HR departments are working with other leaders to develop protocols and processes that support workplace and personal safety. While this undoubtedly includes physical safety from the novel Coronavirus, an essential task is to create emotionally safe cultures that allow people and their organizations to thrive in a post-pandemic environment.
Related: Is recognition the key to psychological safety?
These are urgent priorities. According to one workplace survey, more than one-third of the workforce is burned out, while a separate survey found that a similar number routinely feel anxious or depressed. In response, a McKinsey & Company report found that 96% of companies have updated their HR policies to increase employee mental health resources.
To navigate this challenging transitional time of returning to the workplace, leaders will need to create emotionally safe workplaces where employees are comfortable asking questions, offering ideas and are confident that their leaders are present, engaged, and responsive.
To help facilitate this process, HR leaders can turn to Culture of Safety principles and employ facilitative leadership skills and behaviors. Here are three ways that HR leaders can begin that process.
1. Connect leaders to mission and vision
For most people, business as usual has been permanently disrupted, creating an opportunity for leaders to reevaluate their organization’s purpose, mission, and value. Revisiting mission and vision reconnects team members to their purpose and reminds them of the importance of their work. It helps them process what happened over the past year while moving into the future. It’s essential for regaining resilience and re-building team connections and relationships.
After such an extraordinary year, this may be the right moment for HR leaders to lead an organization-wide conversation to consider what important lessons have been learned and how these new insights will inform ongoing organizational improvements and prioritization of emotional safety.
2. Pursue inquiry | Promote advocacy
Emotional safety is predicated on effective communication. That’s why companies shaped by Culture of Safety principles prioritize inquiry and advocacy as critical leadership qualities throughout the organization.
Leaders should be especially diligent to check in with their teams regularly to understand how they are doing, acknowledging the past and moving them into the future. To achieve this, leaders should ask many questions, focusing on inquiry through neutral questions that demonstrate an interest in team members’ opinions, perspectives, and experiences.
Next, highly effective leaders advocate for their teams, empowering them to make decisions, express concerns, and develop confidence and collaboration at every level.
Of course, effective leaders can’t facilitate for others what they won’t pursue themselves. HR leaders can be especially effective in helping leaders take time to self-reflect, developing an understanding of their own reactions to the near-term impact and longer-term repercussions of an especially challenging year. Helpful inquiry questions might include:
- What have we learned over the last year?
- What was the biggest surprise over the last year? Why?
- What have my team members told me about their experiences, and how does it inform me as a leader what actions I need to take?
- What can I learn from my team members to better understand the experience they have had over the past year?
Ultimately, facilitative leaders will pursue inquiry within themselves and among their teams, using those insights to promote advocacy that inspires, creating a culture of safety to move forward into the future.
3. Re-emphasize collaboration
The past year has caused work to become much more individualistic as physical distancing guidelines, remote work, and safety concerns kept people apart. As businesses emerge from the pandemic, they step into a business environment that desperately needs clear communication and active collaboration.
To achieve these, leaders need to be flexible and open, accessible and strategic. An essential area for leaders to revisit is decision-making. Facilitative leaders find opportunities to include team members appropriately by shifting from decision-maker to decision-manager. Providing clear parameters and reinforcing shared responsibility for outcomes means employees clearly understand expectations and ways of working together.
HR leaders can be especially effective in helping leaders remember that there are three essential dimensions to performance: results, process and relationships. This year has brought process and relationships into clear focus in organizations where previously results were the only priority. Going forward, HR can help leaders develop outcomes that keep the three dimensions in balance and recommend metrics to measure progress and outcomes.
Finally, returning to some sense of normal requires consistency, including reliable and predictable routines, expectations and feedback. Leaders play a critical role in propelling organizations forward by creating conditions that promote consistency and reduce drama and confusion. HR leaders are especially important resources, guiding leaders as they re-establish and reinforce new work requirements and expectations.
After a chaotic and uncertain year, consistent leadership can make all the difference, creating teams that are ready to effectively collaborate to drive better outcomes.
A closing thought
HR departments are working harder than ever to create a safe working environment for companies entering today’s new normal. By partnering with and developing leaders who are ready to move into the future, HR professionals can foster a safety culture to ensure a smooth transition. Facilitative leaders are best positioned to achieve this outcome as they nurture teams ready to meet the moment.
Michael J. Reidy is a senior consultant at Interaction Associates and former head of the Dublin Institute of Adult Education, has been training teams in safety culture best practices for more than three decades.
Sharon Confessore, Ph. D, is a health system executive experienced in talent development, leadership development, executive coaching, innovation adoption, and organization culture. She is known for creating people-focused strategies and best practices for implementing corporate-wide learning solutions, which she’s applied as the Chief Learning Officer of a regional health system and as a unit head of a fully integrated national health system.
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