Today, leaders are struggling to soothe their team member’s hearts, calm their minds, and engage their souls.
In a world turned upside down by fear and uncertainty, leaders have to fight harder to overcome the controversial content that’s constantly distracting and distressing their employees, as well as the challenges of remote work environments and a growing distrust of their job security — and of their leadership.
The disruptive conditions of a global pandemic have certainly enhanced the challenges facing today’s business and organizational leaders. Everyday, ongoing personnel issues like performance problems, time management, and culture-building have been magnified and complicated. Now, more than ever, work is about much more than producing products and performing services.
The noise can be overwhelming
COVID conspiracies that terrify. Political controversies that confuse. Social struggles that divide. Notifications ding and buzz, bringing with them a torrent of information people can’t help but explore and believe. One 60-second video turns into a 60-minute scrolling session. Social technologies have quite literally taken over and reshaped the world as we knew it. Social media has captured its inhabitants’ attention spans, changed their behaviors, and influenced their beliefs.
Of course, the social revolution hasn’t been all bad. Social platforms have connected people in unprecedented ways, and make important news and information more readily available for the right audience at the right time than any other channels in the history of communication.
But as the age span of those audiences widens and the number of users, platforms, and devices grow, we have to ask ourselves how leaders can compete with the cacophony of the modern media machine.
How can we leverage the power of social technology to refocus our teams on our organizations’ goals and tasks at hand without the overwhelming distractions of the outside world?
Keeping life and work in balance
Everyone within a business or organization — from the newest part-time employee to the most tenured corporate executive — has a life that is separate from work. Great leaders understand that these two lives should complement and nurture, rather than struggle against or compete with, one another.
Over the past several decades, companies have recognized the importance of work/life balance. To support their team’s diverse personal needs, organizations have invested in employee assistance programs, onsite childcare and workout facilities, and easy access to mental health resources.
For more and more people, though, the line separating home and work has blurred. That’s been especially true this year, as remote work became necessary and proved quite successful. An estimated two-thirds of companies plan to continue allowing people to work from home after the pandemic.
So how do leaders help their employees thrive personally and professionally and build meaningful relationships and a caring culture without in-person interaction?
Building trust and breaking down barriers
Leaders have the power to steer their organizations in virtually any direction. They can influence their people to grow and thrive or alienate them to the point where they abandon ship. Every single person in an organization needs to know where they fit in and how they contribute to the group’s overall success. Everyone is important. They need to believe it, and trust that their leaders know it. They need to be sure they are an integral part of something bigger than themselves.
How does a leader positively impact, inspire, activate, or drive change within an organization of team members they can’t influence one-on-one?
So many questions… But there is an answer
The 2020 pandemic may have reframed many of the challenges leaders face as well as created new ones. It has certainly created multiple questions that leaders are struggling to answer, and problems they’re striving to solve.
However, 2020 also brought about a brand new answer and an intriguingly effective solution for leaders everywhere: REV.
REV isn’t a social network. It’s a meaning network. REV creates and nurtures relationships among groups rather than dividing or distracting them. Instead of inadvertently isolating people, REV strategically unites them for a great purpose.