COVID-19 - what have you changed?

As business leaders and individuals, we need to look at our people and ourselves and make changes.

These are strange and worrying times, we are faced by a situation we have never had to deal with before and are faced with decisions that no-one in the west has experience making. However, I think there are two simple ways of looking at this that should help in building an effective plan.

1. If you haven’t changed anything - you are part of the problem

We all need to change the way we live our lives, if you ave not changed your behaviour, or your team's working practices, you are doing it wrong! Everybody has changes they can make and I am not talking about just hand-washing and bottles of sanitiser, you need to make significant changes to the way you organise your teams and live your life and if you are still talking about what you can do, you have left it much too late. If you are still talking about phase 1 and phase 2 plans, you need to ditch them and jump to phase 3. Almost every action taken by governments and enterprises would have been much more effective if they had been done two weeks earlier. Make change, make it bold and make it now.

2. Act like you are already infected

This is not about preventing you and your team from contracting the virus, if that is what you are planning for, you are looking down the wrong end of the telescope. This is about stopping transmission, the way to look at this is to ask yourself "What would I do if I had already contracted the virus?" - the answers to that question are what you should be doing now. Right now, your team needs leadership, they are looking to you to tell them how to work and how to live. Don't rely on governments to spread the word, or hope your team will infer best practice from what they know from elsewhere. You need to make a decision and communicate it effectively in clear and simple terms. Clarity is key, telling your people to work from home "where possible" is not good enough, tell them to work from home unless told otherwise. People make poor decisions when worried about their job or health, you need to remove an ambiguity and make the decisions for them.

Also, it is likely that productivity will drop, at least in the short-term - you should let your team know that this is OK. Finally - talk to your team, tell them what you are doing, if you cancelled a cinema trip - mention this. If you are speaking to elderly neighbours to offer help - share this with your team. There will be benefits that come out of this situation, better communication and team cohesion could be one of them. If you have regular meetings that are now being done remotely, encourage people to use video, it creates a closer bond and encourages people to keep a routine.