Thought Bubble - Lead by Example
VIDEO: 5:19 mins
AUTHOR: Robert Craven
In this Thought Bubble Robert talks about the impact that COVID is having on your employees and how you, as their leader, should be reacting.
Transcription:
Robert Craven 00:08
I'd like to talk about care. I think the word cares the word that I'm looking for care, I'm seeing loads, loads of agency owners founders, worrying about the fact that they're their staff and their team just don't seem to care, they just don't seem to have the attention to detail they had before. Now, on the face of it, whether they're working from home or working from the opposite should make no difference. Because we have processes and systems in place, they have their commitment, they have their motivation, they had their target their their KPIs, you know, their OKR. So on the face of it, it should make no difference. And yet, nearly everyone I speak to is saying, there's just stuff around the edges, people aren't double, triple checking. They're not saying they're not following the product. They're not following the system. They're not they're not quite on top of it, like they would be as it was pre COVID. Now that can either be because of the systems and processes you've got in place. Are you communicating? Are you being explicit enough? Are you being clear, and we've already agreed, working from home working from the office should make no difference on that one.
Robert Craven 01:17
But we cannot deny that our people are living through COVID The way we are they're in lockdown to they're trying to make sense of what's going on. Now that post lockdown depending on what country you're in, and, and we with, with suffocated of information about our people, we're not getting all the soft stuff, because we're not we're not having those conversations. Zoom calls tend to be more factual and more transactional and less about relationship. And we don't have the watercooler moment we don't bump into people on the way to the loo, we don't have lunch with them. We don't have a quick drink with them afterwards. We don't have breakfast with them. When we arrive in the office, we're missing all those those soft pieces and tries we might replace those soft pieces. What are we missing are a couple of things. I think, I think the first one is, if you will people are watching the news, the BBC, they are just being rained down on how dreadful it is and how difficult that is. And either they feel that, you know, they are in the middle of this horrific crisis and what are they going to do about it? Or they kind of sticking two fingers up at it and saying: How dare they tell me what to do. Either way, the sheer volume of COVID conversation, on television, off television, wherever you go, is kind of impacting everyone and their and their attitude.
Robert Craven 02:48
And that kind of leads me on to my second point is we don't understand the context that our people are in. I mean, we don't even know some of us if some of our people are actually sitting in a bedsit or sitting in a flat with five brothers and sisters and three dogs on 27th floor with their laptop on the ironing board while they're sitting on the bed or when they're in some private office. We don't know that for everyone. And you really shouldn't know that. And we don't know how much COVID has impacted on people, you know, we we now all of us no family or friends or friends of family or or whatever it is, who have been impacted by COVID. All of us have now been impacted by positive tests, negative tests, negative positive test, or is it on is off, oh, the test hasn't arrived, and so on and so forth. So I think we can't underestimate the uncertainty in the ambiguity that they've been living under. Now it's our job as as owner, founder director, in front of our staff, and in front of our customers and in front of our potential customers, to show some navigation about the way forward to talk about the opportunity to talk about where we're going and what we're doing, and not endlessly participate in this. This doom and gloom compensation.
Robert Craven 04:14
So my point is this really, that, that we need to get back on top of the detail you need to say to people they don't know unless you tell them? We need to say no, we're everyone we are we're not in this tough time. But we're not as great as we were, we need to be more attention to detail go back to the processes and the systems. Think about how we can double check, think about how we can triple check. We can't afford to make mistakes. That's not in our playbook, you know, and our values are not about making mistakes, our values about being doing and doing awesome work. So it's kind of just a bit of a wake up call. Because nearly everyone I know is talking about the fact that the work was going pounds with being shipped just isn't quite as sharp as it was and no surprise, but we need to be better than that.