You're dealing with low employee morale during a crisis. How can you boost team spirits effectively?

Acknowledging stress and anxiety during a crisis is essential for maintaining a healthy and productive work environment. By creating a space where employees feel heard and understood, we can foster transparency and trust. It's important to address the challenges head-on, encourage open dialogue, and show empathy. This not only helps in alleviating stress but also reinforces that we are in this together. Providing support and understanding can significantly boost morale and make the team feel valued and supported.

To boost team spirits during a crisis, acknowledge the challenges openly and provide reassurance by sharing a clear plan for navigating the situation. Offer support and resources to help employees cope, and celebrate small victories to maintain motivation. Encourage open communication, recognize individual and team contributions, and foster a sense of community through team-building activities, even if virtual. By demonstrating empathy and maintaining a positive outlook, you can uplift morale and reinforce resilience.

This is especially important when the crisis is affecting one team disproportionally. Make efforts to recognize those individuals, encourage their peers in related departments to support projects like shout outs, thank you messages, and notes. Employees often enjoy the opportunity to shout out others who make a positive impact in their day to day. Think about this strategy long term, don't only recognize your staff when things get hard. Take the time all year to motivate, encourage, and thank them for their efforts.

During difficult times, what can spark inspiration? For some teams it's the mission and vision. But it has to feel real. Show progress. Lead with product. Tell stories of who you help and how. Remembering who you are in service of is key.

Consider creating a space for sharing open, optimistic dialogue. Team members and leaders can share stories of resilience, creativity, or moments of unexpected success can help lift everyone's spirits. It could be a weekly meeting or maybe a digital space where employees can post uplifting stories or shout-outs to colleagues who’ve made a difference. This approach not only fosters a sense of community but also encourages everyone to focus on the silver linings, even in challenging times. The key is reminding everyone that despite the crisis, there are still plenty of wins to celebrate.

You're also an employee, as well as an IC practitioner, so you might suffer from the low morale too. It's important to recognise that it's legitimate for everyone to feel that way sometimes but that it's not forever. In our job, we almost have to give ourselves a pep talk, and find the genuine positive parts of the situation. Then you're far more sincere when speaking with others and helping them recognise the way through low morale. Speak like a human, not the business' voice box. The truth is more convincing, and in IC, we're often fortunate enough to see both the close up detail, and big picture so find the positives, and spread those as far and wide as you can: in meetings, webinars, or even just in the break room!

Be realistic, and avoid being overly optimistic. Positivity's important, but you'll lose your credibility if you try and gloss over bad situations. Also, acknowledging that mistakes may have been made. Or that decisions made in the past were appropriate at the time, but haven't aged well. Although we're there to cultivate good feeling towards the business, if we pretend that every decision is perfect and that even bad times are "all part of the plan", people just end up seeing you as the corporate ventriloquist dummy, blindly spouting clichéd business jargon. Be real, be honest, be human. And let others recognise that in their colleagues and that not all decisions are an easy right or wrong one.