How do you as a leader support your employees' mental health during a crisis? This was the topic of the LEAD Talk "Mental health - in a time of corona". Two concrete tools to support relationship and task management were presented.
Because while many managers are currently leading from a distance, it's never been more important to be close to employees. Every employee is different and requires different managerial focus and effort. To act as a smart and concrete manager, you can use a systematic mapping of what your employees need.
Tool 1: Relationship management
This tool aims to map employees who may be at particular risk. The manager goes through each employee in relation to the four fields and considers: Demands and resources, social situation, prior history, general need for close follow-up
This way, you as a manager can see if there are any of your employees that you need to have a sharper management focus on. It is crucial that you as a manager do not consider the tool as a checklist, but formulate open questions and emphasize that it is up to the individual employee to decide how much they want to share.
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Tool 2: Task management
When demands exceed resources, stress can occur. In a crisis like the corona crisis, many of the normal resources such as collegial sparring or deliverables may have fallen away. This calls for a renegotiation of demands and resources, because as a manager, you can't take for granted that you and the employee agree on which tasks should be prioritized. Mapping tasks is a relatively simple tool for aligning expectations and renegotiating requirements and resources.
The tool creates a systematic overview of each employee's task portfolio, how tasks are impacted and to what extent, and how critical the impact is to achieving goals. In this way, tasks are framed in relation to the impact.
