Employee engagement in a COVID-19 world
The parallels between the 1940s and C19 have implications for employee engagement
May 1940: Britain, alone against a mighty foe. A people brought together in unified purpose against a common enemy. Fast forward to May 1945: the spirit of VE Day. A belief that the success of our struggle meant that we could achieve anything we set our mind to.
It’s hard to argue against the fact that, channelled correctly, a crisis, especially one caused by a readily identifiable and external foe, can be an incredibly motivating force. It draws on the innate human desire to be part of something bigger and more meaningful than yourself.
Today, the battle against C19 has generated a huge sense of common agency across companies which are responding to the challenge. Roles have more meaning and a collective sense of purpose grows from the shared endeavour.
Time will tell which firms had a good and which a bad crisis. In conversations with corporate affairs leaders, stories already abound of teams doing truly remarkable things in the most trying of circumstances and in mind-bogglingly short periods of time: of thousands of call centre roles being onshored in days; of complex production lines and supply chains being entirely retooled in weeks.
In normal times, such levels of organisational change would have taken months or years or - more commonly - never actually happened. Yet it has. When this is all over, and we emerge blinking into the sunlight, can such behaviour become the new normal? How do you turn it into something sustainable, but still effective, and is there anything we can learn from the 1940s?
Capturing the lion’s heart of your organisation
It’s vital to keep your leadership front and centre, providing direction and stability. ‘The nation had the lion's heart. I had the luck to give the roar’, Churchill said of his pivotal role in the Second World War. According to Gallup, 52% of employees strongly agree that their employer has communicated a clear plan of action in response to the coronavirus, an improvement of 15 percentage points from mid-March. But that still leaves 48% who do not agree. Too many leaders today are keeping their employees in the dark.
When it is darkest, people need reasons to believe and to hope. Churchill would draw upon examples of courage and bravery. So, capture the stories of your own response to C19 and make them part of your company folklore. Culture is created through the experiences that employees have within the business and, just as importantly, with each other. Call out the behaviours that you have admired during this time and list those that you particularly want to internalise and sustain. Qualities that come to the fore in a crisis – agility, flexibility, speed of action, cross-functional collaboration – often fall away when it abates. The real victory for businesses is to build on these newly rediscovered ways of working.
With millions of people required to work or school from home, blending work and life is even more complicated, creating unprecedented pressure on employees' health and wellbeing. One director of corporate affairs at a FTSE250 told us her team had been working for five weeks flat out without a day off and that they could not take much more. Your staff will be getting a clear sense of whether the business is looking out for their best interests. Only a direct manager can really know each employee's situation. Their effectiveness or otherwise should be kept in mind.
The need to do things at pace has meant that red tape and bureaucracy have been (temporarily) removed. People have been given more freedom to take decisions, which has raised their feelings of status and wellbeing. You’ve set them free, so don’t look to cage them again. As in 1940 this was in no small way enabled by the feeling of all being in it together. Anecdotally we have been told that the decision to reduce executive pay significantly reinforced this at the front line. The challenge of restructure and redundancy will stretch this unity, potentially to breaking point and beyond. So how to respond?
We believe that core to how firms engage over the coming months is to remember the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. A sense of belonging develops when identities and purpose align. Brexit led to tribalism across the country, but a moment of national crisis has now, for the most part, brought us together, as it did in 1940. As Churchill said: ‘The road to victory will be long and hard, and involve much pain and sorrow … but if we support each other and stick together, we can do it.’