4 Valuable Skills Leaders Need To Manage Employees In The Pandemic

– 4 Valuable Skills Leaders Need To Manage Employees In The Pandemic –

Managing a team in the midst of a pandemic is a challenging task. With employees constantly fearing a pay cut or loss of employment, the stress levels are soaring high. Moreover, the lack of social engagement due to working in isolation has led to employees feeling lonely and depressed.

What can leaders do to ensure employees are engaged? The top answer to that is providing learning & development opportunities to employees. It is the need of the hour as employees are facing unique challenges in this phase.

Since everything is remote now, employees need to be trained on how to make the best use of tools to work productively. Additionally, they need to learn new skills to stay abreast with the technical advancements of their industry.

Thankfully, providing L&D opportunities is now easier than ever with tools like LMS. By automating the delivery, management, and tracking of eLearning courses, LMS software allows businesses of all sizes to help employees get more efficient at their jobs.

But managing employees in the time of Coronavirus goes beyond providing them learning opportunities. Leaders need a wider skill set to ensure employees feel supported, stay productive, and keep working to the best of their abilities.

To help you out, we have compiled a list of 4 valuable skills that all successful remote leaders swear by for managing a team in such a crisis:

1. Communication skills:

Undoubtedly, the number one skill a leader needs in these times is great communication skills. Without being able to clearly communicate responsibilities and put forward expectations, it is impossible to get work done. 

Constantly staying in touch with employees without being nosy will allow employees to get all the necessary information to do their jobs well. At the same time, leaders must know how to conduct productive virtual meetings so employee time is not wasted in digital communication. 

2. Emotional Quotient (EQ):

These unprecedented times have brought forward the need for leaders to take extra care of employee well-being. Since employees are dealing with various levels of stress, anxiety and depression, managers need an emotional quotient to understand and manage them well.

As a leader, EQ will help you be empathetic about employee needs and manage them in a way that boosts their motivation. This is very important for improving employee performance and helping employees collaborate in order to build a strong team. 

3. Delegation:

This phase where everyone is scattered geographically and dealing with a different set of issues needs a unique kind of leadership to ensure work doesn’t get stalled. Leaders need to plan work very efficiently and know how to delegate it the right way to ensure success.

Successful leaders know what tasks to delegate and identify the right person for the job to increase the chances of work getting accomplished faster. If leaders don’t know how to delegate they may end up mismanaging and delaying projects. 

4. Critical thinking:

Considering the unusual situation we are facing, there are a lot of problems leaders are facing for the very first time. Without strong problem-solving skills, it can get difficult to manage employees and get work done.

Leaders need to be critical thinkers in order to pinpoint, analyze and resolve problems before they turn into big issues. This requires patience so as to understand the entire scenario before taking any decisions. 

Conclusion:

It takes strong leadership to motivate employees to deliver their best, while at the same time being compassionate towards them. But that’s what the current situation demands. And that’s why leaders today must embody the above-mentioned skills to manage the situation and employees correctly.