First, the toilet paper and hand sanitizer aisles were bare. Now your boss gave you instructions to work from home, your kids’ are home from school and you can’t go out for dinner, to a movie or the mall. While it may feel extreme, these steps are being taken to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. In doing so, you’re participating in a public health strategy known as social distancing.
So you should stay at least 6 to 10 feet from anyone except your immediate family. The goal of social distancing is to reduce exposure to large crowds, like ones you’ll find at concerts, crowded bars or schools.
As we live in what seems to be a temporary, alternate universe, where our daily routines have been uprooted and replaced with new unfamiliar habits, it can bring a lot of uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and helplessness, not to mention those pesky “what if?” questions that keep our minds spinning. However, in times like this, it’s important to focus on what we can control. The good news is, there is something within our control that each of us can do to contribute in the fight against COVID-19 – that is Social Distancing.
Up until a few weeks ago, many of us had never even heard of the term ‘Social Distancing’ and now it seems to have taken over our daily conversations.
What is social distancing?
Social distancing is a public health practice that aims to prevent sick people from coming in close contact with healthy people in order to reduce opportunities for disease transmission. It can include large-scale measures like cancelling group events or closing public spaces, as well as individual decisions such as avoiding crowds.
With COVID-19, the goal of social distancing right now is to slow down the outbreak in order to reduce the chance of infection among high-risk populations and to reduce the burden on health care systems and workers. Experts describe this as “flattening the curve,” which generally refers to the potential success of social distancing measures to prevent surges in illness that could overwhelm health care systems.
All of these recommendations are meant to help foster compliance with what many public health officials say is one of the most important strategies for everyone to comply with (not just those who may have been exposed to COVID-19 or feel sick): social distancing.
Social distancing is not an easy thing to do, but it’s necessary when facing a pandemic. Given that it can feel extreme, lonely and sad to avoid people, here’s how you can do your part to reduce the spread of the virus, but still stay sane and feel connected to those you love. Remember, it’s a temporary measure that can help protect countless others (and yourself) in the long run.
Why is social (physical) distancing so important?
Health officials have repeatedly stated that physically distancing ourselves from other people is critical to try and limit the spread of COVID-19 as best we can.
The rationale behind social (physical) distancing is to try and avoid a huge spike in COVID-19 cases that will put too much strain on our health care system all at once. If everyone gets sick at the same time, hospitals will be overwhelmed, and won’t have the capability to provide the necessary treatment for everyone.
Instead, we can focus our efforts to “flatten the curve” and prevent that spike in cases. If everyone does their part and practices social (physical) distancing to slow the rate of COVID-19 spread, it will give hospitals a fighting chance to continue to have room, necessary supplies and health care providers for all patients who need care. This will protect those individuals at greatest risk of serious complications or death.
Ways To Manage Your Team In Social Distancing
The Covid-19 virus has disrupted and rearranged the workplace with breathtaking speed. In the span of a week, organizations across every sector have sent millions of employees home to work remotely. Without warning — and in many cases, without preparation of any kind — managers have been thrust into the position of leading virtual teams, many for the first time.
It’s challenging enough to manage yourself in quarantine without face-to-face human interaction and the structure of a typical workday. Now add to that the task of managing a team under those conditions, especially when you’ve never done it before. It’s daunting.
Pressurized conditions, heightened uncertainty, and an overall sense of dislocation make it even more difficult. Under quarantine, every aspect of the manager’s role is magnified and complicated. You’ll need to reset expectations for how work gets done and adapt your management style to a new context.
To help managers who are new to this — or even experienced managers who need additional guidance in these trying times — here are my best recommendations for supporting continued learning and the emotional well-being of your employees.
- Reset your expectations: Most teams are socialized and accustomed to synchronous work and standardization. They work together, located in the same office, under the same working conditions, with the same work schedule. In a quarantined environment, managers must help their teams shift immediately to asynchronous work and personalization. You’ll need to reset expectations for how work gets done, letting go of when and how tasks are accomplished, and allowing team members to accomplish their responsibilities on their own terms. This means focusing on results and offering more flexibility.
- Stay in regular touch: Sociometric research proves that shorter communication cycle times are more effective in building and sustaining morale and engagement. Use instant messaging to stay in regular contact. Don’t let an employee go half a day without checking in. You might want to hold a huddle each day, ideally by video, perhaps rotating responsibility for who leads it. Set the expectation that everyone be present and not distracted. Model what it means to show up as a virtual team player.
- Support continued learning but keep it short: Learning doesn’t have to stop in this new environment, but it may be more practical to use micro learning. Focus on sharing short lessons on a single topic in a five to 10-minute segment. These might cover a specific tool, behaviour, or skill. Rotate the delivery of these lessons among team members and allow them to identify their own topics for training. You might ask a different team member to debrief the lesson and lead a short discussion about the application, relevance, and implications of what everyone learned.
- Assign buddies and peer coaches to add a layer of mutual support:Attending to every team member’s needs will quickly exhaust the capacity of most managers. To distribute that responsibility, organize team members into pairs with each individual assigned as a buddy and peer coach to their assigned colleague. This shared leadership model creates a second layer of mutual support and guards against emotional isolation. Ask the buddies to check in daily and assess overall engagement and well-being. If people haven’t filled this role before, it can be helpful to give them some guidance.
- Interpret tone and voice as proxies for face-to-face feedback:It’s harder to read the emotional cues of your people when you aren’t in the same room. Instead of relying on non-verbal data and body language, now you must rely on proxy indicators such as text, voice, and infrequent video communications. Pay close attention to: patterns in the tone of written communication; rate, volume, pitch, and inflexion of voice communication; and any physical gestures in video communication. If you know your people well, changes in these patterns will help you identify early that a team member may need some additional support.
- Model optimism and drain the team of fear: Optimism is contagious. Leaders who demonstrate hopefulness and confidence in the future are better able to help their team members find meaning and purpose in work, especially under stressful conditions. And don’t forget to use humour as a relief valve. Remember that fear freezes initiative, ties up creativity, and yields compliance instead of commitment. Finally, consider that constraints are often the enabling factor that sparks innovation. Invite your team to use the quarantine conditions as a stimulus for new ideas.
- Update even if there’s no update:Uncertainty fuels anxiety. The more you communicate and share, the less chance there is to develop an information vacuum within your team. Communicate regularly even if you don’t have new information to share. Maintaining transparency through a crisis with frequent updates is the ultimate expression of good faith, empathy, and genuine concern for your team.
- Continually gauge stress and engagement levels: Make it crystal clear to your team members that your chief concern is their well-being. Take time to monitor their engagement by periodically asking each team member two quick questions. First, on a zero-to-10 scale, rate the level of stress you currently feel. Second, using that same scale, rate your level of overall engagement. Your intuitive or impressionistic sense of the individual may be wrong, so it helps to get quantitative responses.
Humans are hyper-social creatures who long to belong. And psychological safety — where your team members feel included, safe to learn, safe to contribute, and safe to challenge the status quo, all without fear of being embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way — is paramount even under conditions of quarantine. When you create and sustain these conditions you allow them to continue to perform and contribute, and perhaps, most importantly at a time like this, you acknowledge their humanity.
This article was brought to you by Safe Space. Safespace is itself a provider a safety technologies and provides related services as required by its customers.
SafeSpace: A Safety System that Qualifies, Secures and Monitors travellers for Zero Contagion during Travel and beyond. It believes that there are 4 key was in which social distancing can be made a success or followed. They are as follows:
- Design the space for movement
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SafeSpace also believes that there are few solutions from which we can manage people’s movement in public place such as:
- Sanitization Management
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And for this purpose i.e. social distancing SafeSplace is also providing few products which would help people for the same.
- Counter System
- Cono Wearable System
- Smart Mirror Services
- ML Omnicloud
- Corerock admin platform
- Cono User App
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