Are we there yet?
I’m sooo tired!
How much longer?
I’m hanging in there- just…

Don’t worry! There are many ways to energise you and your tired teams.

Living with different sources of stress

Arguably there have been few individuals who have been untouched by stress, tiredness and/or fatigue while managing the many regular changes in life circumstances that COVID-19 has brought this year. We also know that change is often unsettling for various reasons and degrees, including as a source of anxiety and stress. The psychological trajectory of COVID-19 has seen many Australians track from the start of the outbreak, where people pulled together to create a sense of community spirit, agility, adaptability and a sense of thriving in a VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) world. It has been many months since the first changes and now we’re largely in a state where fatigue, uncertainty and reactivity, all of which are permeating our personal and professional lives.

Whether working from home, back in the office, or in a hybrid working environment (some at home, some in the office), individuals and teams are having to adjust to different sources of stress, including these:

What you are feeling may be very much normal, but uncomfortable. As humans most of seek certainty, predictability, familiarity and meaning, all of which are currently being challenged. Individuals and teams are needing to find ways to energise and combat these challenges. Before we look at tips, let’s understand a bit about what might be happening to us and our teams to become de-energised.

Individual experiences of stress

Uncertainty triggers anxiety. Fatigue generally involves sustained levels of psychological stress that not only lead to tiredness but physical and/or mental exhaustion. Research into the area of stress and fatigue helps us to understand how COVID-19 is impacting individuals and teams as the months pass. The Yerkes-Dodson Law (1908) suggests there is a relationship between performance and arousal (stress). Too little arousal and an individual risks becoming disengaged, too much arousal (i.e. changes and uncertainty or many of the items in the word cloud above) and an individual risks becoming fatigued and burnt out. Ideally when arousal is in between, we find individual performance is optimised. Each person needs to find their own unique equilibrium, there’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach you can take.

Team experiences of stress

Many teams are having to make changes as a result of government directives and the market or industries in which they operate. The business world is unstable and challenging. Team members have shifted their behaviours from the initial ‘all in’ feeling of wanting to pitch in and make things work in their organisational environment, to displaying fatigue, disengagement and “running out of puff” – too much stress. Team members themselves are often operating outside of optimal performance as they juggle new working routines. Surveys suggest that those who are working from home are working more hours, with fewer breaks than before (see the Centre for Transformational Work Design’s COVID Survey results in the References list below) and dealing with more meetings and emails than pre-COVID (Kost, 2020). They don’t want yet another zoom meeting, whether it be business or social. Zoom fatigue is real, one of the many poor outcomes occurring as a result of many people trying to work the same way as pre-COVID but in a new context that is simply not comparable and is indeed de-energising for many.

Tips for energising tired teams

Now is a critical time to engage and energise our teams and team members. But how?

Here are 5 takeaway tips.

1.   Clarifying how the work matters and how it is best done

It’s important to get a balance between providing structure versus letting people fend for themselves. Structure can give us a sense of control and autonomy over our lives in times of change. Teams and their individuals need to know the big picture– their link to the broader organisational mission and strategy – is still there as a constant, particularly when remote teams can feel a little adrift.

• Clarify and/or realign team member roles and responsibilities, including tasks, processes, goals and roles around the vision, mission and strategy – and also help team members know how to adjust their role accordingly so they know “I play a vital role”.

• Clarify the team’s ways of working – processes and behaviours, team habits and preferences – covering those that aren’t changing, as well as those that are.

• Recognise the pluses and positives of the team’s work together. Sometimes you can’t control the ‘what’ or the ‘when’ but you can control the ‘how’.

• Focus the team each day or week on the things that matter most. What 3 things will you/we deliver today? A team workboard (Trello, Miro, Planner, Jira, etc) can give visibility to how each person is tracking along.  Celebrate when team members deliver.

2.   Find new ways of engaging

As a team explore different ways to engage and/or work with each other. Aim for maximum flexibility and team adaptability (while always keeping an eye on end deliverables). This may include strategies like:

• Allocating a period of the day for specific ‘downtime’ – for example, having 12:30-2pm as specific quiet time for individuals (i.e. no team meetings). Team members may choose to use this time for their own work, for lunch, for family, or to self-nurture such as take a walk outside, catch up on a latest article or something else that rejuvenates them.

• Set specific times in the day for self-care such as rest, slowing down, time for curiosity, patience, mindfulness, being gentle, adopting awareness, acceptance and support. Having shorter meetings (e.g. 50 minutes not 60 minutes) allows everyone a break to recharge and turn up fresh for their next meeting/call.

• The 40-hour work week is evolving. It may be that your team could experiment with the 4-day working week, flexible working days and varied working hours for individuals (i.e., times of the day that suit each team member best – morning or afternoon/evening) and for teams (i.e. core hours or days that all can commit to working synchronously).

• Be discerning about holding meetings – if you don’t need the collective brains in the one moment then don’t call a meeting. Encourage asynchronous work where it can be done.

• Model enthusiasm and take a positive approach even when it feels hard to do so. Notice and reinforce each other for taking a positive attitude and contributing proactive energy to tasks. It doesn’t cost anything to show your appreciation of each other.

• Ask the team what they feel would be fun to do to re-energise, and add such “energisers” in where you can, e.g.:

  • Make laughter a priority

  • Write a team song or catch phrase for the week

  • Do the things that bond us, even while apart (e.g. cooking, watching the footy finals, watching shared favourite TV shows or movies)

  • Send a gift of some seeds to all team members so all can grow a seed while apart but together

  • Set up an ongoing event such as a book club, movie night, Q&A hour, online games etc

  • Schedule in team coffee breaks, end-of-week catch ups, fireside chats

  • Allocate/determine virtual buddies to check in on each other each week

  • Build a social newsletter or # channel on your collaborative tech platform (Slack, Teams) to share news and views on all range of “non-work” things that people care to share

  • Start a virtual recognition board for showing gratitude and thanks for teamwork and achievements as well as those living the team’s values and agreed behaviours particularly well. Similarly, some organisations have online recognition points systems for giving kudos to colleagues that can be put towards vouchers or gifts.

• Note: If a new or ‘out-there’ way of engaging doesn’t work or resonate with the team, don’t push it. Accept that ‘the team has spoken’ and let it go as an experiment. Move on to something else.

3.   Understand each team member well

Know your team members, each and every one of them.

• Understand what is going on for your people and their different responsibilities, i.e. managing kids learning school from home, aging parents, community responsibilities, different work hours. The scenarios here can quickly push a team member into too much arousal and the negative consequences of this (i.e. Yerkes Dodson). While steps can be made to help mitigate the work-life load.

• Try to find the personal/professional life balance in sharing of information. As social beings we prefer to be in groups as opposed to working independently. When we get to know people we often want to take that extra step towards helping them. This can also be a starting point for innovation.

• Encourage team members to proactively share their ideas, insights, and learnings with each other, as well as what motivates and frustrates them. This can be done as part of a regular team meeting, or as a special event, or in one-on-one ‘coffee catch-ups’. It could be a trivia session where the team is the subject (“Which one of us used to regularly go skydiving?”).

• Leaders must catch up regularly with their team members to ensure good use of their skills and strengths, while attention is also directed towards understanding development opportunities (what’s hard, difficult or easy to do?) and helping team members grow their capabilities.  Reviewing an individual’s achievements in their role in light of their development and any changing COVID workloads may mean you agree to swap tasks in and out to suit the individual and the overall team.

• Find out what preferences and expectations each team member has for the next few months of work. Are they keen to continue working from home, would they rather be back in the office, or would they find a hybrid arrangement more to their liking? Listen to their underlying needs – what is most important to them? Acknowledge what you’ve heard, but best not to make any promises until you have assessed all the team members’ needs and matched that back to the team’s workload, stakeholder requirements and organisational directives (with or without further team input).

4.   Doing less is best (but don’t oversimplify)

We have to be careful not to overdo ‘energising’ of teams. By the time people have done their work-pertinent zoom meetings or tasks, it is going to create undue stress to load up on teaming activities. Sometimes energising teams may in fact mean removing some activities so that calendars aren’t over-full with events. Mini-breaks may be all that’s possible, if the COVID workload is high. Don’t oversimplify tasks to the point that people become disengaged, but don’t ask them to do too much as they may then become overwhelmed and burn out (remember Yerkes Dodson).

5.   Build team resilience

Build your team’s overall resilience by focusing on strategies that enable individuals and teams to bounce back from change and difficult times more efficiently and effectively. This area is worthy of an article initself! Having resilience people doesn’t necessarily mean a team is resilient. There are lots of tools out there to use to help teams – we recommend an evidence-based one that is proven to work, like the Working With Resilience R@W Team Scale, which identifies 7 key team-level behaviours that create resilience in groups of people who work together: robust, resourceful, perseverance, self-care, capability, connected and alignment (www.workingwithresilience.com.au).  When team resilience is aligned for group performance then the team has the capacity to flex in response to changes, uncertainty and external demands, from both within and outside of the organisation.

Conclusion

So, there are quite a few energisers that teams can draw on in times like this…

In Australia, remote teamwork will stay for the immediate future, at least while uncertainty exists around the capacity to manage COVID and mitigate against second and third wave outbreaks in the community – we must all do our part to protect the greater good.

Although individuals and workplaces are showing signs of stress, tiredness and fatigue, it is important to recognise we can do something about it: we have agency. We can put strategies in place to energise teams and their people, thereby improving personal and collective wellbeing. Furthermore, humans are wonderfully resilient, agile and adaptable – traits that leave us in good stead in managing the challenges and working towards energising tired teams.

Go ahead, add a little energy to your next team catch up and see what happens!

Support available

The team experts at Impactful Work are ready to assist with programs and sessions that will keep your team feeling good about the work they are doing while being as productive as possible. Contact us at info@impactful.work to discuss your team’s needs.

References

Ferrazzi, K. (2014). How virtual teams can create human connections despite distance. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved September 24, 2020, from https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-virtual-teams-can-create-human-connections-despite-distance

Keller, A.C., Knight, C., & Parker, S.K. (2020) Good news – most employees are as productive at home as in the office. But there is room to improve. Centre for Transformational Work Design, Curtin University, WA. Retrieved September 20, 2020, from https://www.transformativeworkdesign.com/post/good-news-most-employees-are-as-productive-at-home-as-in-the-office-but-there-is-room-to-improve

Kost, D., (2020). You’re Right! You are working longer and attending more meetings. Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. Retrieved September 20, 2020, from https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/you-re-right-you-are-working-longer-and-attending-more-meetings

Working With Resilience https://workingwithresilience.com.au/ with the R@W Team Scale designed by Kathryn McEwan, Organisational Psychologist.

Yerkes RM, Dodson JD. The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology. 1908;18(5):459–482. Reprinted by Classics in the History of Psychology. An internet resource. Christopher D. Green, York University, Toronto, Ontario.