Navigating a crisis with a resilient M.I.N.D.

There’s a reason why flight attendants instruct passengers during a pre-flight safety briefing, to put the oxygen mask on themselves first before assisting their loved ones next to them. This goes against our natural leadership instinct which is to help people under our care first before attending to ourselves. But when we do not nurture ourselves first, we impair our ability to perform well, we ‘transfer’ stress to our team members or family, we make poorer decisions and do not inspire or energize people around us.

Like many other businesses, when COVID-19 struck and Malaysian went into a lockdown back in March, my team at Naluri faced an existential crisis. As a health technology company helping corporate employers and insurers to reduce the risk of chronic disease and mental health of their employees and policyholders, our sales pipeline came to a grinding halt. All potential clients were also in crisis mode as they needed to 100% focus on the COVID-19 threat and all other health programmes were postponed. Even existing clients put our on-going programmes on hold. We normally start with doing a health assessment that includes a blood test, but any activity with physical contact had to be stopped.

We only had a few more months of cash runway left and we were in the midst of a fund-raising round. Two potential investors that we were really counting on, pulled out because they did not want to proceed during a time of extreme uncertainty. We had to somehow convince the few other investors to commit, and keep the company alive when revenue dries up.

On reflection, what we learned was that we are all overwhelmed with fear and anxiety from the uncertainty of what was going to happen. Navigating this required us to manage and control that fear in our team, and avoid it from escalating the pressure on our team members. We knew this is a prolonged situation that cannot be fixed by just pushing everyone to work harder, nights and weekends, because that would lead to burnout and affect productivity and quality of work.

The specific actions we took were:

• Increasing communications internally. Even when we did not know what was going on and had no answers, we still needed to communicate often, especially when we were not physically together. We changed our daily stand-ups to twice-daily, at 9:00-9:15am morning check-ins to prioritise the tasks for the day, and 5:45-6:00pm evening check-out, so that we make explicit decisions to minimize the amount of work that needed to still get done at night. Detailed weekly emails updating the whole team helped to get everyone to understand where we were.
• Address job and salary uncertainty. Rather than opting for job cuts or across-the-board pay cuts, we worked out that it is better for our leadership team to take bigger pay cuts and preserve the salary levels of junior staff and everyone’s jobs, because they need it more than us. We communicated this quickly so that all team members knew how we intended to deal with the revenue shortfall.
• Block out time for problem solving and planning. In a crisis, we can easily get caught up fighting fires because there are always so many urgent matters to ensure that we could meet each month’s payroll obligations. At the same time, there are structural changes happening and we need quality thinking time to plan for a longer 6-12 month horizon to come up with ideas on how to pivot the business. It’s impossible to effectively deal with short-term urgent matters and long-term strategic issues together. We need to carve out a specific time each week where we only focus on long-term strategic issues, or else we never get around to doing it properly.This enabled us to come up with new services to cater to our clients needs in a remote-working environment.
• Reinforce our purpose and impact for our clients. We saw how frontline healthcare workers were performing at superhuman levels because of their commitment to their profession and patients. As leaders, we must keep communicating and reminding every team member about our purpose and how our clients value what we do. It is very easy to get lost in daily tasks and work routines. Rather than micro-managing and focusing on tasks, we doubled-down on emphasizing our mission to help people achieve their healthiest and best selves and empowered our team members to decide for themselves what actions they believed helped us to achieve our mission.

This crisis is not going to vanish soon. And there will always be more challenges and crises coming in the future. The best way for us is help build a resilient M.I.N.D. in our organisation:

• Mindset and motivation. Coach our team members to shape their positive, can-do mindset and attitude and reinforce a deeper sense of purpose that fuels the motivation to keep performing.
• Intentional response. Crises have a way of making us react impulsively. We need to learn about biases in our thinking and beliefs shaped by our past experiences that may not be relevant anymore, and get different viewpoints so that we can respond intentionally, rather than react impulsively.
• Nurturing our team. Even when our team members are remote, we can do a lot to keep them informed and connected and encourage them to practice self-care, not by telling them but by role-modelling and taking care of ourselves first. They learn by watching us - are we nurturing our team or burning them out?
• Decisive actions. We may not know what will happen in six months time but we need to keep moving fast. Being clear what needs to get done every day and checking in twice a day, and then making time each week to reflect on what course corrections we need to make to keep being relevant to the market.

We’re thankful that we are now accelerating our growth - as the business has tripled since March. We’re on the lookout for talent to join our team. If you have a resilient M.I.N.D. and want to join our mission, please reach out:

• Software engineers. UI/UX designers. Data scientists. Business development executives. Customer experience executives. Psychologists. Dietitians. Fitness coaches. Pharmacists.

Please also reach out if you’re facing difficult issues during this time and we’ll do our best to help out.