Episode #398: The Year Two Covid Danger Zone For Leaders

Covid-19 popped up out of nowhere in January 2020 and we began following the news reports about this mysterious virus coming out of China. We all remembered the SARS era and how Japan had sailed through that pretty well. We weren’t particularly worried and expected Japan would sail through this one too. However, around the middle of February our clients starting postponing scheduled in-house training. This is when we realised Covid-19 was a serious issue. We had public classes scheduled too and at our own volition, worrying about people’s safety, we decided to postpone them. We also said to our team to work from home. If they had to come to the office, they could do so, but try to come in late to avoid rush hour trains and go home early for the same reason. On March 3rd we had a socially distanced, mask wearing Town Hall. This was the last mass gathering of the clan to date. We were able to piggyback on our American colleagues ten years of experience delivering LIVE On Line training and we pivoted across to remote delivery of our content.

For the first time in my career, I was leading a remote team, with a single person in each location, some working from a desk, others from their kitchen table, couch or the kotatsu, the low table typical of many Japanese homes where you sit on the floor. I went out and bought a whole swag of headsets for everyone. Actually, when I got down to the electronics store, I realised I wasn’t the only one thinking like this, because the shelves were pretty much stripped bare. I kicked myself for not being sharper and speedier about the new necessities. Fortunately, we all had laptops, so we could work from anywhere. We had previously considered moving our server to the cloud and it was then that I regretted we hadn’t taken that step at that time.

I wanted to keep the team together, so we transferred our morning chorei or morning meeting online. We call it the “Daily Dale”. I made it the rule you have to dress for work, regardless of whether you are working from home or not. You also have to come on camera. I required this so we could keep an eye on everyone, in case some people are becoming isolated and depressed, being stuck at home all the time and are starting to withdraw.

In our normal routine, by turn, we each lead everyone through the “Daily Dale” covering the company Vision, Mission, Values etc. We do this every day to re-energise our WHY. We kept this going so that every day just about everyone could reconnect with each other. After a while, I realised we needed to reproduce the chit chat opportunities that you get when working together in an office. We started “Coffee Time With Dale” at 3.00pm every day, for those who wanted to catch up informally with their colleagues.

I had four new staff start in January, just in time for the business to plummet and the team to disperse. They had very little time in the office with their colleagues, especially in those all important early days of starting with a new company. They needed lots of help on how to do things and where things were located. I found that leading a dispersed team was much more time consuming than normal. I was the center of the wheel and I had spoke connections to my reports, but what was missing were the cross spokes connecting them together. I found I had to spend time telling the others about aspects of a conversation and decisions I had reached with their team mates. Of course, they wouldn’t answer their phones, so I needed to call multiple times and leave messages. I also found that the millennials in my team were not good with the phone. They don’t check their messages. The whole chain of command was bogging down.

Somehow, we have kept it all together so far. My concern is this situation is likely to last until the end of the year and beyond with everyone working from home. I had scheduled another full safety Town Hall for January 2021, just to get people together for some face time, after such a long time apart. The Government then announced the lockdown, asking people to stay at home, so we cancelled the meeting. Isolation fatigue is a real thing in Japanese society, which tends to operate extremely well in group formats. The hairy chested Aussie individualistic culture I grew up in, may handle isolation and not seeing work mates much better than Japan does, because of the latter’s group orientation.

Many of my team are singles, cut off from family, friends and work colleagues. I keep telling everyone to schedule days off, take some of your leave. You can’t go anywhere, but at least you can sleep in, watch a movie, read a novel, anything which provides a break from the grinding routine of chasing revenues in a business depression. Do they do it? No. Being at home doesn’t feel like a holiday. It is boring when that is all that is open to you. They are all strenuously hoarding leave days waiting for the Big Breakout Release, when we can all travel again. Fine up to a point, I get it, but I am still worried about my team’s mental health, so I keep pushing this “take time off” idea anyway. How long can this remote leadership go on?

I know what happened over the last year, but what is going to happen this year? How do I keep people enthusiastic, as the situation grinds us all down? Do I need to ramp up my communication and reach down more often to those on the front line? Do I need to schedule more regular Town Halls, get people together in a large socially distanced room for comradery and provide actual face time, as opposed to only screen face time? Do I need to mandate days to be taken off, so people can sleep in or read their novel, or watch some movies? Where are the cracks that are going to appear in this second year of our collective nightmare? How do I keep people virus free by encouraging them to avoid contact with random people, because they may be carriers of the virus? Do I need to increase my positivity much further to drive positivity in the team? What am I missing, because my own world has become so diminished and small now?

One thing is certain – this isn’t going away for a long, long time regardless of what various carefully coiffed Cabinet Ministers may say. Do we have what it takes to get to the other side and have an intact business with a healthy, happy team? These are the big questions facing us all, as we lurch into Year Two of the pandemic.