Tag: working from home

Working Parents + Shelter-in-Place. Mission Impossible?

by Tawny Lees, COO and Executive Coach, tawny@mariposaleadership.com

As I’ve been talking with and coaching clients this week, the reality of long-term school closures and shelter-in-place orders seems to be hitting working parents the hardest.

It can feel impossible for two-parent homes where both partners work from home — and gets even harder when one parent works outside of the home, for single parents, when kids have special needs, or if elder care is thrown into the mix.

Three main ideas here, curated from what I’m hearing, reading, and experiencing myself as a working parent:

Set Expectations

Get radically real about short-term (now to 3 months) expectations of yourself:

As a professional. Anyone responsible for kids at home is just not going to be as productive and/or available as usual. It’s okay. This is an unprecedented situation in our lifetimes; as a leader, you and your team need to figure out how to work through it together. Shift the mindset from “I/we can’t get this all done” to “here’s what I/we can get done.”

Assess your and your team’s current deliverables, initiatives, and capabilities.
Reset short-term priorities and deadlines.
Re-assign/share the workload across the team.
Establish preferred times for meetings or availability for real-time interaction. (E.g. meetings only between 9-12 and 2-5.)

Proactively align on all the above with everyone who needs to know – cross-functional partners, customers, suppliers, boss, etc.

As a working parent. You will not be able to offer the same level of time, attention, and expertise that your children would normally receive from teachers, caregivers, etc. during this time. It’s okay. Do your best, they will survive. Shift your mindset from “I’m being a bad parent” or “my kids are missing out on XYZ” to “we will get through this and learn previously unimagined lessons about life.”

Set Structure

Involve everyone and make a family work plan:

Figure out a schedule and division of labor that works. For all. You’d be surprised that even young kids can contribute to brainstorming ideas and making a plan. (Whip out some flip charts or post-it notes – they’ll love it!) And by involving them, they tend to be more enthusiastic about sticking with it. Things to consider:

Can you and your partner or older kids work in “shifts” to take care of younger kids?
Can you enlist or employ friends, family, babysitters, tutors to virtually engage your kids on a regular schedule that you could rely on? Via video, they could talk, read, play games, sing, do dances, do schoolwork, etc.
What are the most engaging/reliable activities that kids can do with little to no supervision? (e.g. movies, online gaming, schoolwork.) Schedule those activities during important work time. They will be getting more screen time; get over it.
What work can you do while sitting near/with them? (e.g. status reports or emails at the kitchen table while they do schoolwork and ask an occasional question.)
As you prioritize your precious time, what is the best way for you to spend the free time you’ll have with the kids? Having fun? Relaxing? Getting outside? How do you want to “be” during that time?
What are your rules for the time when you need to be uninterrupted? (e.g. door is closed, don’t knock.) How can you reward them for sticking to the rules? (e.g. an enthusiastic high-five, cuddling and reading for 15 minutes, going outside to play.)

Make sure everyone in the family understands the schedule/plan and experiment! Try it for a week and then revisit – What worked? What didn’t? What to try next?

Recharge

You’ll need energy to pull off this mission:

We all know the metaphors – “put your oxygen mask on first,” “you can’t pour from an empty cup,” etc. Well, they are true. Especially now.

You will need to get creative, and insistent, about making sure you are getting adequate sleep and time to relax and recharge.
Include a favorite activity in your plan, make a pact with someone, do what’s needed to make it happen.
Take time off from work, use the weekend as a weekend (it’s still there, even though days seem to be blurring together.)
Give yourself some perspective – look ahead 10 days, 10 weeks, 10 months, and 10 years from now. How will you feel then, how will you look back on what is happening now?

You are not alone! We are all in this together. We would love to hear what’s working for you so we can help share information with others. Often, the first question our clients ask us in a session is: “What are your other clients doing about WFH?” Let’s spread the best practices.

To download a PDF of this article, click here.

April 3rd, 2020|Categories: Blog, Mariposa Articles, Stress / Work-Life Integration|Tags: corporate culture, covid-19, executive coaching, leadership, leadership coaching, work-life balance, working from home, working parents|

April 2, 2020 / Articles We Like / Blog / Stress / Work-Life Integration

Four Tips to Navigate Working from Home

by Anne Loehr, Executive Coach, anne@mariposaleadership.com

I talk for a living, whether it’s through keynotes, employee training, executive coaching, human capital consulting, writing articles, or just a chat with a client. I’m lucky enough to have clients from a variety of industries and sectors, giving me a wide view of how organizations are handling similar situations. This week alone I had the honor of chatting with people from large consulting firms, start-ups, the Federal government, tech firms, mid-size companies, biopharma organizations, large school systems, manufacturing firms, real estate industry leaders, and HR professionals. I learned a lot of best practices for navigating the Covid-19 work from home (WFH) situation and I’d like to share those with you here.

Schedule daily white space

Someone said to me, “It’s just telework. It’s not a big deal.” Wrong. It’s not just telework and it is a big deal. Why? Because the old paradigm of telework was that you worked from home 1-2 days/week, usually while others in your home were at work and/or school. Now everyone is working and learning under one roof, which adds complexity to the situation. I have it fairly easy; our high school daughter can self-manage her day. However, I have one client who has 3 children under the age of 5 at home while both he and his wife are trying to work. Ouch! That’s a tough situation!

So what are organizations doing to manage this? One best practice is to create intentional white space and schedule set times for team calls. One firm only holds calls from 8:30 am-noon and then 2-5 pm, local time. This allows people to have a midday break to attend to their own personal needs or the needs of those who live with them.

Learn together

It’s easy to disengage on employee development right now. I’ve heard “Training and development is a non-essential, so we’re cutting the live employee training we had planned”. I get it; financial stability and cash flow is vital right now. However, don’t forget about your teams who want to feel a sense of normalcy. So instead of offering a live employee development training, conduct a 60-minute virtual ‘lunch and learn’ on living through change or a 45-minute webinar about stress management instead. It’s easy to do and shows the teams that you are still there for them.

Lempathy

It’s easy to lose focus when WFH, so set a clear focus on short-term goals and how the goals align with the organizational mission. Create a 2-minute podcast or video to remind your team what you’re working on and use shared docs to create accountability.

It’s also easy to tilt toward excessive empathy, such as “It’s OK that Biva didn’t achieve his tasks today. He has 4 kids at home.” Giving a pass every once in a while shows flexibility; excessive empathy breeds missed deadlines. So use ‘both/and’ instead; in other words, try “Wow! Having four kids at home while working is hard. How can you achieve the biggest deadline today and have the kids home? What’s the first step? Second step?” Bottom line: show you care AND that goals still need to be completed. One of my coaching clients calls this “lempathy”: leading with empathy. It works for him; see if it works for you.

Focus on self-care

Stress manifests in different ways, for different reasons. In general, there are three pillars of health: physical, mental, and emotional. Take a self-assessment and ask yourself how you’re doing on:

Physical: Maintaining the nutrition, sleep and exercise that your body needs
Mental: Focusing on the task at hand
Emotional: Self-regulating your emotions appropriately with those around you

Whatever you do to manage your WFH situation, remember to keep it fun! People want to feel connected; they are looking for the water cooler experience, where they can just have a fun chat for a few minutes with each other. So set this up with virtual coffee chats, happy hours, walks, exercise classes, and even hobby times (knitting anyone?). One company in Boston creates daily entertainment videos for the employee’s children to watch while the parent is working. Another organization spreads smiles via Skype. What will work for you?

I’d love to hear how you are navigating your work from home in these stressful times. What is working for you and what is not? Let’s share experiences. Send me an email or contact us on Twitter.

April 2nd, 2020|Categories: Articles We Like, Blog, Stress / Work-Life Integration|Tags: coaching, coaching tips, covid-19, empathy, executive coaching, executive leadership, self-care, work-life balance, working from home, workplace culture|

March 3, 2020 / Mariposa Articles

How to Be Leaderly in Utter Uncertainty (and what behaviors to focus on in this current coronavirus situation)

How HR and business leaders coach their teams in uncertain times

by Sue Bethanis, CEO/Founder of Mariposa, sueb@mariposaleadership.com, @suebethanis

Like you, I have been flooded the last three days with news and emails about coronavirus precautions. To allay my own anxiety, I spent much of this last weekend reading, and today, I am writing because I want to help reduce anxiety and be practical about how we can act as leaders of our organizations. As a leadership coach, it follows that I am focusing on leadership behaviors.

We have an obligation to protect and care for those we work with. It’s on us, and we can’t rely on politicians. There are potentially two pandemics here – wide-spread Covid-19 and wide-spread panic. Whether either becomes a pandemic in the US depends a lot on the actions we take.

What are our primary goals as leaders in this situation?

Plan for uncertainty
Overcommunicate with empathy and clarity
Model diligent healthy behaviors to limit spread

First, planning for uncertainty means planning for the worst-case scenario. If you have not developed a revised travel policy, remote working policy, and sick/leave policy, it’s time to do so now. I also suggest sharing your plans and learnings with colleagues in other organizations. Coinbase, for example, has open-sourced their plans. Check out how HR leaders and Coinbase are on top of this here and how a seven-point plan from McKinsey covers business practices here.

Frankly, I think developing these policies is the easy part; it is tedious, but you can borrow from and benchmark with others on this. The harder part is putting these policies into action and having to make decisions in the moment when you don’t have all the information you need. How do you plan for that?

This is the time to uplevel your flexibility skills and mindfulness. Planning for uncertainty also means expecting the unexpected and priming yourself for surprises. Go into your day thinking that there will be something that happens that you have never dealt with before. This will help you be calmer in a crisis because the surprise doesn’t cause as much of a stress (fight-or-flight) response in you. Your calmness will help others be calm and will lead to less anxiety and overall panic.

This is also the time to re-engage in a meditation/breathing practice if you have let it slip lately. Doing even 5-10 minutes of meditation to start your day will help you through the rest of your day.

Second, practice overcommunicating with empathy and clarity. Here are some examples:

Set up regular communication practices via all channels to get the word out about revised policies and ongoing revisions. It’s important that employees get into the habit of checking @all for the latest info.
If someone wants to stay home because they are sick, potentially sick, or has been in contact with someone sick, grant it without hesitation. But don’t stop there: have a conversation with them and go out of your way to ask about your team members’ concerns and what support they need. These simple words can go a long way to quell fear and anxiety. That’s your job always, but it’s especially your job now: support, support, support.
On the other side of that situation is this: a sick employee or co-worker who insists on coming into work because they have an important meeting with clients/customers or internal colleagues. Gently insist they don’t come in, and work through who else can cover for them. Further, if there has ever been a time to have back up to the backups, now is the time. Look at your team, chat with your team, and think about the importance of supporting each other. Who can back up whom? What does each member of your team need to get up to speed on to be able to cover for each other?
No doubt we are going to be doing more videoconferencing because many employees will be working from home. Be sure to communicate regularly about how working from home can be potentially isolating for you/your team. Give peeps a chance to voice their concerns about this and ways to overcome this.

(Click here for a handy infographic on “overcommunicating” practices.)

Third, it’s vital as leaders that we model healthy behaviors with diligence! This will limit the spread of the virus. Based on what I have read in the last three days, this is a good list for leaders to model:

Wash your hands for at least 15-20 secs, including the top of hands and in between fingers. Good idea to use (and provide) hand lotion as well because our hands are dry from all this washing.
Use hand sanitizer every time you enter a new place and every time you leave; have a personal size bottle with you at all times. Organizations should also have them in every room; and employees should use it at the beginning and end of every meeting. Also ensure to wipe down all touched surfaces with disinfectant anti-bacterial routinely.
Don’t touch your face! The best article I have read is on hand-to-face transmission; read here.
Do not hug, shake hands, or fist bump. Elbow bumping is now in vogue.
If you have not had a flu shot, get one now! It won’t stop the coronavirus, but it will aid in stopping other flus. From a public health perspective, this will have less impact on hospitals and clinics. In the U.S., 32 million people got the flu last year; 310,000 people were hospitalized; 18,000 people died. In Japan, the “regular” flu rate has gone down in the last 2 months because people are hand washing more often. Fascinating article on this here.
If you are sick, do not go into work and expose people (this should be the case for any type of sickness). It will also make it less awkward for everyone. When you have to cough or sneeze, do it into tissues or your sleeve at all times.
Stop buying face masks because they are ineffective for those without symptoms of the coronavirus. These purchases deplete the supplies needed for medical professionals.
Get better at video conferencing! If you don’t already do it on a regular basis, start practicing. Here are a few things to know:
- We at Mariposa have been using Zoom, a video conference software for 3 years and it does take practice. Plan a time with your team to work remotely and start teaching them the protocols. Zoom also offers free webinars and live training guides on how to use their services.
- Get the right technology tools in place NOW and help keep your team connected when they aren’t in the same physical location. Think about what specific tools and devices will be needed, i.e., online file sharing tools, laptops, webcams, smartphones, etc.

(Click here for a handy infographic on “healthy behaviors.”)

If you would like to chat more about how to lead in this time of uncertainty, ping me. Happy to help anytime. 4152653142, sueb@mariposaleadership.com

Finally, here are some more excellent resources in addition to ones hyperlinked above.

Center for Disease Control: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
ELAD: Coronavirus (COVID-19) PSA for Startups
TechCrunch: How to work during a pandemic
Wall Street Journal: Coronavirus Hits U.S. Business Activity
Wall Street Journal: Coronavirus Is Different. It’s Rapidly Hitting Supply and Demand.
Harvard Business Review: 8 Questions Employers Should Ask About Coronavirus

To download a PDF of this article, click here.

March 3rd, 2020|Categories: Mariposa Articles|Tags: communication, coronavirus, covid-19, executive leadership coaching, HR Leadership, leadership behaviors, uncertain times, working from home|