My heart goes out to everyone affected by coronavirus & COVID19.
During times of crisis and uncertainty, it’s easy for anxiety about one area of work or life to affect our communication across the board. In this Communication Q&A, Robert wants some pointers for keeping conversation and communication in his workplace more positive and productive despite the very tense atmosphere in the office.
“Hi Lauren – as the coronavirus progresses my employees as well as our clients are becoming increasingly
anxious. I understand why they feel this way but it seems like coronavirus fears are creeping into every conversation even though everything here is still business as usual. Every discussion even if has nothing to do with COVID19 seems more tense. How can I encourage a better mood in the office? How can I help people stop dwelling on everything that’s going on and get more positive conversations going?Thanks,
Robert.”
Check out my answer to Robert in the video below, scroll down to read the full transcript, or click here to watch it on Youtube.
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For some more great resources on communication during COVID19 or other times of crisis, check out the following:
- Molly McPherson Podcast: Crisis Plans – What They Are and Why You Need One
- Alex Plaxten – 10 Coronavirus Crisis Communication Tips
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to communication Q&A. My name is Lauren Sergy and if you’ve seen my other videos you will recognize that we are not in my usual filming studio right now! I recently received a couple of questions regarding communication during all of the coronavirus panic and fears that are going on right now, and I wanted to respond to those right away while it’s still pertinent and still top of everyone’s mind.
This question is coming at us from Robert who asks “Hi Lauren – as the coronavirus progresses my employees as well as our clients are becoming increasingly
anxious. I understand why they feel this way but it seems like coronavirus fears are creeping into every conversation even though everything here is still business as usual. Every discussion even if has nothing to do with COVID19 seems more tense. How can I encourage a better mood in the office? How can I help people stop dwelling on everything that’s going on and get more positive conversations going?
Thanks,
Robert.”
Robert this is a great question and I’m very glad to hear that you’re wanting to find ways to elevate the conversation in your office, with your employees, with your clients or stakeholders, because it is true that when we have big, global, frightening events like this going on, every single conversation appears to be affected by them. So to help you and to help everyone who is watching this episode here create a better communication environment in your office or in your work, to help you keep things a little more upbeat, a little bit more positive and focused with your employees as well as your clients, I have three tips to help you move conversations forward so that we don’t spend too much time dwelling on the negative.
Recognize that bad news such as the coronavirus pandemic will affect the way people hear, interpret, and respond to information in many different ways.
Bad news in one area, or concerns and worries in one region of life will bleed into communication and behaviors in other areas of life. Really, we need to look no further than all of the turmoil in the stock market or the crazy hoarding behavior that’s been going on – such as people stockpiling toilet paper – to understand that one piece of information can affect the way we interpret information about other pieces of info as well.
This is about how one piece of news can affect our worldview, can affect how we see and interpret information that has to do with many different areas of our life. When you find a lot of uncertainty in one area of life what tends to happen is that people start to become very risk-averse in their behavior – but also risk-averse in their communicatio. Tthis shows up as what you described in your question to me: people becoming tense and anxious in discussions and conversations that have absolutely nothing to do with the news of the day – in this case that’s COVID-19. This follows a really fundamental aspect of human behavior which is that if we’re feeling uncertain in one area we become more conservative and seek out more security in other areas of life as well.
This shows up in conversations in terms of what sort of language we use. So we’ll stop using really positive or forward-thinking or even risky type of language like “I want
to take on a new activity; we should try to innovate in this certain area.” And we’ll start to use much more conservative, security-and-certainty focused language: “do we know how that is going to work? What effect is this going to have? How can we make sure that we’re okay during this time? I don’t want to be too risky right now.” Those are two very different frames of mind and when we’re feeling a certain way, we tend to indicate those feelings through our language choices.
This is something that as a communicator you should recognize, respect, and kind of follow along with during this period. So if you are talking to a client about a new product or a new service that you have, that you want them to be considering right now (and now being March 9th 2020 just for records sake), right now I would recommend avoiding risk or uncertainty type language. Avoid talking about things that seem really novel or things that seem really new, and are untried and untested as of yet. You wouldn’t want to talk about this “great new widget that you have coming out…that it’s the leading edge of technology in its area.” Instead you would want to say things like “this widget that we’re recommending to you has been through a lot of really rigorous testing. We made sure that it’s going to function in a wide variety of
circumstances and here are all of the backups that we have in place to make sure that we can handle anything that might go wrong.” The first example I gave,
which was all about new innovative technology, things that are fresh to the market, right on the cutting edge… that’s a lot of risky type language. It requires people to take a leap of faith. And when times are good they might be very, very eager to do that. But…times ain’t so good right now, so instead we shift to the more conservative language of “We’ve tested this out, we have backups and fail safes if it doesn’t work, it is tried and true and we’ve got your back.” That would be a much more context-sensitive sort of language to go with and would probably sound a lot better to your clients than the risk heavy language we were discussing earlier.
Number two: don’t deny but don’t catastrophize.
At this point in time coronavirus is pretty much everywhere. We’re not going to avoid its effects at all but we’re also not wanting to blow things out of proportion. We need to strike a balance between burying our heads in the sand – which is no good, isn’t helpful and actually will just make people even more anxious – and going completely off the deep end. Such as that US Senator who showed up with a gas mask on – that is catastrophe communication.
What you’re aiming for in your conversations – whether it’s conversations about coronavirus or conversations about other areas of work that people are just seeming to catastrophize a little bit more right now – is to strike the middle road. Think of what could likely happen, what is reasonable to expect, and bring it up. Acknowledge it, discuss what your plans are around it, but you want to avoid going with catastrophe style language. Catastrophe type language are things like “We don’t know what’s going to happen,” or “everyone is freaking out” or “this is going to completely change the way that we do business from here on out.” There’s a lot of that sort of language
going around right now. All that it really does is stoke fears and stoke feelings of helplessness so we want to avoid that.
I also recommend against catastrophizing behaviors. I mentioned that earlier example of that Senator who showed up wearing a gas mask – that is catastrophe behavior! Gweneth Paltrow’s social media posts talking about her amazing charcoal mask that’s going to keep her safe and healthy – that is irresponsible catastrophe communication! You definitely don’t want to bring that kind of communication into your workplace. So don’t go jumping out of your skin every time someone coughs or sneezes. Should you mention things that are going to be going on that employees need to be aware of? Absolutely. Encourage good hand hygiene but maybe don’t go around throwing bottles of Purell at absolutely everyone you see and obsessing about washing hands immediately upon entering the office and sanitizing everything as soon as you touch it. Model the behavior that you want but avoid sounding overly panicky when you’re discussing it. That is easier said than done in the current
environment but it is still very very doable.
Tip number three is to focus conversations – whether they’re about COVID-19 or not – on *what you could do in a situation* instead of on what could happen.
There is a very fine difference between talking about what we could do in a reasonable tone in a given situation versus just talking about what could happen…basically speculating on all the different scenarios that might occur if something like a corona virus spreads through your office or starts affecting your business or what-have-you. What you want to do here is keep people focused on all of the proactive things they could do to carry on with business, to make sure that work is still going the way it needs to go, to keep themselves healthy in the event of something happening. This is about focusing on proactive language.
Let’s say that someone in your office gets sick. Instead of saying “we could all get sick, it might rip through this office completely, everyone could end up staying home ]and being quarantined for days and weeks on end,” focus instead on saying proactive things like: “If you do come down with symptoms make sure that you stay home for the amount of time you need to stay home. Now what could we do to make sure that while you are stuck at home we can continue communicating? How might we continue getting our work done? Maybe we could look at telecommuting during this period, maybe we could check in through more video conference meetings or even just checking in over the phone?” One is *what you could do*. The other is what could happen. The first gives people much more agency and much more of a positive feeling of control in their everyday life than the other.
Keep conversations moving towards the positive things of what you could do to improve or to handle a situation instead of how out of control a situation can possibly get.
So there you go Robert: three tips on how you can elevate the conversation – and hopefully the mood as well – in your office. Help people stay a little calmer admist all of these fears, admist that 24-hour news cycle that’s kind of makes it feel like the world is coming to an end right now, and hopefully help everyone that you are working with that you’re dealing with carry on business as usual with more of a feeling of safety, security, and control.
Now I would like to throw a question to everyone watching out there: How is the mood in your business or in your place of work right now? Are things generally upbeat, are things business as usual or have you been impacted by COVID-19 and by the current coronavirus outbreak in a way that has necessitated you to really wrangle with the way people are communicating at work at the moment? I would love to hear your stories, so please share them in the comments down below. I hope you all stay healthy and I hope you all keep communicating in a way that’s positive, that’s realistic but not catastrophic, and in a way that helps you stay connected to those around you. Thank
you so much for joining me on communication Q&A. Stay healthy and keep on talking.