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We are in the middle of Mental Health Awareness week and now, more than ever, this is the time for managers to be listening to their employees. It’s difficult enough to know how some people are feeling at the best of times, and now is not the best of times! After seven weeks of lockdown some of the stresses of isolation are starting to show. People are desperate to get out and see friends, meet relatives and get back to normal.…

Although we have not been able to have face-to-face meetings during the lockdown, we can still enjoy the next best thing. We can sit around a virtual table and discuss things almost as naturally as sitting in a real meting room. We have Zoom, Teams, Webex and many other video meeting tools readily available. Broadband connections are common and the Internet has held up well with the increased traffic. We are getting accustomed to using video in our personal lives. Whether it’s…

It’s too easy to get into the habit of holding lots of meetings when we all work in the same place. Our calendars rapidly fill up with back-to-back meetings and we are rushing from one meeting room to another. Now all that has changed. We can still hold virtual meetings whilst working from home and we are now getting quite used to Zoom, Webex, Teams and all the other videoconferencing applications. But it has made us stop and think about…

One month into the lockdown it’s becoming clearer that we are in this for the long run. There may be a partial easing of the restrictions in a week or two but until there is an effective treatment or vaccine many people will be putting themselves in danger if they return to their normal place of work. Leaders will be under pressure to get businesses running up to full capacity again and they will be faced with some difficult decisions.…

When people work together in the same place they form friendships, enjoy each other’s company and join together in social activities. From the casual cup of coffee through to the Christmas party most people feel they belong to a team when they share experiences together. For many their social life is centred on their friends at work. Now people are isolated away from their colleagues. What will substitute for the lunchtime conversation or the chat in the pub after work?…

Now more than ever you need to trust that people working from home will be getting on with the job. Just because they are out of sight of their manager that doesn’t mean they are sitting around watching television. It’s most likely that they are finding creative ways of getting work done without coming in to their usual workplace. Home working isn’t new. Thousands of people were working at least some of their time from home before the crisis. What’s…

It seems obvious to say that keeping in touch with people working from home is important, but it’s easy to end up with losing contact without realising it. “Out of sight is out of mind” is very true when so much of conventional daily contact in the workplace has now disappeared. Now you are faced with people working from home you need to find different ways of communicating, not just for issuing work instructions but for all the other information…

This is the first of out Top Ten Tips for managing home workers. We will be covering one per week for the next 10 weeks. When you are working together with your employees it’s easy to watch what they are doing to check they are working. Now you can’t see them, you have to trust that they are getting on with the job. This means measuring results instead of monitoring their efforts and counting the hours they put in. Suddenly…