How to Proactively manage your team through COVID-19 and beyond
1 – Wellbeing of Current Employees
We all know the old adage that people don’t leave jobs they leave bosses, and in most cases this is the truth. However, in my experience, this is more down to poor communication than any fundamental personality differences. After all there’s a good chance that you hired the person in question which would suggest that you saw something in them that you liked?
As such, it’s important to ask yourself; how often do you actually speak to your team one on one (away from the weekly team Zoom conference)? This isn’t to suggest that you need to garner an encyclopaedic knowledge of their personal life, but you’d be surprised that the effect asking how someone is and how they’re coping will have.
2 – Team Member’s Future Plans
Do you know what your team members see as their next step? Unfortunately, this is usually a question that gets left until the end of year appraisal and then isn’t addressed for the next 12 months.
With everything that’s going on, there should hopefully be some more time in the diary to have these conversations with your team. What we’re not suggesting to do is sit down and have formal appraisals with everyone, but you’d be amazed at how much you can gain through an open conversation about where a person sees themselves in a year’s time, and the types of projects they’d like to get involved in. Now’s also a great time to start to discuss any additional training that may be beneficial.
3 – Your Plan for the team
This is a great opportunity to begin to think about what’s been working well and what you could do better.
Having taken time to understand the goals of your team individually, it’s now time for you to marry this up to your vision for the team as a whole. What do you want your team to look like and how will you implement this going forward?
4 – Succession Planning
What shouldn’t be put aside in all of this, are your own ambitions. This is a great time to think about your future plans and what steps you’re going to take to make this happen. However, what would happen if you were to get that promotion tomorrow? Would there be a void or are there people already in the team who’d be ready to step up and assume responsibility?
Whilst the timeframes likely won’t be this short it’s still something to consider. If there is a large gap in experience between yourself and members of your team, it’s likely that were you to move up that you’d have to hire externally for your own backfill.
Of course, this happens all the time. However, in our experience it is most successful when this is done ahead of time, as opposed to after the gap is created. Depending on your own timeframes, it could be time to bring someone in immediately (initially as a second in command) to get them up to speed or it could be worth starting to develop a potential pipeline of options that you could reach out to. The last thing you want to do is risk disrupting the harmony of a high performing team by having to make a rushed decision on your successor.
5 – Layers of Management/Responsibility
As touched upon above, it’s important to consider the dynamic that exists within your team. Is there a gap between your own level of knowledge/expertise and the team, or alternatively do you have a more experienced team and have the task of keeping them motivated/challenged?
You may have also found during steps 1&2 that, due to the sheer size of your team, that it’s just not viable to regularly keep in touch with everyone. As such, it’s probably worth considering bringing in some form of structure with regards to reporting lines so that team members do feel they have someone who listens to them and who takes an active interest in their personal development. In doing so, you’re much more likely to retain staff and maintain a happy & productive workforce.
However, your challenge might be that you have a team all with a similar level of experience of your own and you need to keep them engaged. How you choose to do this should come about from your previous discussion with them around their future plans and how they want to develop.
The most common step that managers take to keep more experienced talent engaged is to give them some form of team lead/mentorship role and this can be and effective method in adding a new dimension to people’s roles. However, it’s important to understand if the person wants to manage a team. If not, thrusting this responsibility upon them can have unintended consequences.
6 – Key Person Risk
The concept of key person risk is a tricky one to get right. You of course want some level of specialisation and expertise amongst your team, but you don’t want it to be so extreme that you’re left high and dry simply by someone taking a week’s annual leave. You should have a good idea of how you want your team to look and which areas that your individual team members will look to develop in. This should make it easier to look at your team structure and see where there are any risks of over-reliance on one person.
The best way to manage key person risk is to try and build a team which has overlaps in knowledge. This should also mean that you have a team who can jointly share the workload as opposed to one person being overworked at peak times.
If you do feel there is an overreliance on one person then the prudent thing to do would be to train existing staff to help share the responsibility. In the interim, getting additional support from a contractor may be a viable option whilst another member of the team gets up to speed.
7 – Talent Pipelining
Despite all of this however, people will inevitably leave and it’s up to you to be prepared for this event. In reference to the point above, you want to ensure that any one member of the team does not hold a monopoly on knowledge or expertise in an area, so when they do leave you still have coverage within the wider team. However, they will still need to be replaced.
It might be that you have someone already in the team ready to assume more responsibility in which case the transition is made easier. However, if you do need to look at the wider market, do you know where you’d start?
The most proactive managers are regularly meeting with potential future hires and are still doing so (albeit over the phone/zoom) regardless of the pandemic. This is an important exercise as it will help you to understand how your team differs to your competitors and will again shine a light on your level of key person risk within the team. If there doesn’t seem to be anyone on the wider market with a similar skillset to a member of your team then it could be time to try and diversify some of the roles within your team.
Another benefit around talent pipelining is that it should in theory reduce the amount of time any vacancies in your team remain unfilled. Having a ready made network of candidates to reach out to will reduce your time to hire. Furthermore, in the current climate where headcount is more heavily scrutinised than ever, this should allow you quickly demonstrate the necessity and value add of a hire.
