Managers are accustomed to seeing their team members’ professional selves: dressed for work and focused on shared tasks.  However, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed more of our colleagues lives that managers may be used to seeing.  Even if our organization is accustomed to telecommuters, the current situation is not an ordinary “work from home” environment. Here are some visible and invisible aspects of the COVID-19 on the workplace that managers and leaders should consider as we work with geographically dispersed staff.

Our staff is doing more than working from home. They are working while under “stay at home” orders during an unprecedented global pandemic. People have a limited bandwidth of attention. While working every day, they are also responding to a constant stream of new information about a global health crisis. As staff adapts to how this new information impacts their work, home and community life, leaders are called upon to be flexible, adaptive, creative and responsive.

Philanthropy is not operating business as usual. Acknowledge that staff may need to set aside planned work in order to respond to the rapidly changing needs of grantee partners. Program staff are spending more time communicating with grantees and with peers in the field, working to identify effective responses to the current situation at a time when democratic government institutions are also being eroded. Likewise, grants management and finance staff may find that, to move those resources out to grantees, they have additional tasks that are not part of their usual work calendar. Effective leaders are helping our teams to slow down, sequence, and prioritize work expectations.

Flexibility means recognizing that we may not know all the constraints under which your staff is working. Many of us have experienced video meetings featuring an impromptu appearance by a child. Less visible onscreen are the coworkers who have increased elder care responsibilities, or who serve as a primary support for a relative or neighbor who is quarantined due to illness.  Flexibility may look like managers approving PTO for staff whose workloads haven’t changed. They may be carrying responsibilities that are usually held by a family member who works in health care; getting us toilet paper through supply chain logistics management; behind the scenes work in finance, emergency housing, government – those essential personnel who are working around the clock during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Adapting to the “stay at home” order will affect the mental and emotional capacity of people to work well. Restricted physical movement while sitting in front of a screen all day, and being trapped in low-stimulation environment of home, can both inhibit your team’s psychological well-being.  Video meetings are more physically demanding than face to face meetings; we can respond by making meetings shorter, and focusing them on shared visual content instead of faces on the screen.  The inability of people to gather for community celebrations of Passover, Eastertide, and ifthar during Ramadan may make online social time with colleagues even more important to everyone’s emotional well-being. Be sure to welcome team communications that are purely creative, or just for fun. 

Being a responsive leader means preparing for the ways the pandemic may affect the physical health of our colleagues, too. Staff are unlikely to tell us when they are facing food, medication or health care shortages, so our regular crisis communications can point out the resources available through telehealth or the Employee Assistance Program.  We should expect that people in our organization will become ill with COVID-19.  Make sure every supervisor knows the current policy on  ADA accomodations, PTO, Emergency Family Medical Leave and Bereavement leave. 

These are difficult times. Being an adaptive, responsive leader during a crisis requires more of us than managing people who are just working from home. We must allow ourselves more time to process more information, and to make more adjustments. We can put some time just to think into our weekly schedule. We can humanize our virtual workplace by letting a little more of our own personal context show - it will make us a more trustworthy leader. 

Taking care of ourselves is a way to model the creativity and caring we want our organization to reflect during these difficult and uncertain times.  Our own adaptiveness is the key to leading teams with the strength to get through this crisis together.