Don't forget the team

We are in an unprecedented time, with huge numbers of people working from home now, and teams split up, many for the first time, in order to socially distance and help control the spread of the Coronavirus, or COVID19.

While we are all trying to adjust to a new norm for now, and many of us are trying to also manage to care for children who are home from school as well, one of the things I haven't heard much about is maintaining the team. I get it, there is a lot going on.

However, managers, your team is still a team, and especially now, while we are operating in new ways and feeling so distant from each other, they still need to feel connected -- to you as a resource, to their fellow teammates, and to the business itself. Make sure that you take the time to think through how to bring your team into a team mindset, even from a distance and from far apart. Make sure your team members each individually know that they are important, you value their commitment to working from home during this time, and don't be hard on them for having to take care of their personal commitments right now as well.

And now is the time to start thinking about how you are going to bring everyone back to feeling connected to the business and its brick-and-mortar location when you get back together. It can't be business-as-usual with no acknowledgment of the social distancing, how hard this was for everyone, and how much your team did to keep things going in a new environment.

Make sure you make plans to: Acknowledge, Thank, Celebrate, and Reconnect.

And once these things are done, sit down with other managers and leadership, if there is some, and put your thoughts about what worked and what didn't into writing and policies and procedures for the future. Hopefully this is the only time we will face something like this in our lifetimes, but it may not be. Make sure you take the things you learn and build on them going forward.

Now go and check in on your team!