Hi, it’s Genevieve from the Art of Extraordinary, how are you today?
Thought I’d share four key needs that you must be meeting for each and every one of your team members now, if you’ve gone remote. Am outside to enjoy a little moment of fresh air and taking a break, because it’s really important now, if you are managing a team remotely that you understand what their core needs are, what their drivers are, so that you can help them manage their time, be more productive, efficient, the cohesion of the team because that’s gonna look and sound completely different now with the new working environments that most of are under.
And so, let’s start straight into them ’cause this one’s gonna be short and sweet.
Firstly, are you meeting everyone’s need for certainty?
Or how can you help a team member meet their own need for certainty right now? So that might be through scheduled meetings, through work plans, through action plans. If someone knows that they’re gonna definitely be having a one-on-one with you now, no cancellation, no too busy putting it off because that would break that feeling of certainty for people. Obviously when we have got so much uncertainty going on at the moment, the more certainty that you can create and help people with and structure that you can put into place for support, would be ideal. So certainty’s number one.
Then there’s the need for variety. Now, you can kind of pretty much say safely at the moment that variety is about risk-adventure challenge, okay? Now, people have a lot of uncertainty going on at the moment, so that’s what fits in this variety box. So, people might already have enough, and you may not have to think too much about that one, at the same time though, if people have gone into their home working environment, and they have to be doing the same, same thing for eight hours a day, and historically maybe they’ve been used to having meetings, breaking things up, or, you know, they go out from their workplace during the day. So, then how, that’s adding the variety. You know, they do say variety’s the spice of life. So, are there some areas of variety that you need to be assuring that the team are having in order to keep mixing things up a little bit as well.
Back to the certainty for a moment as well, I forgot to say that certainty covers up on things like safety, comfort, and security. So how secure is your team feeling now? And remember, for some businesses it might be one to two weeks into this remote working environment, so perhaps then, you need to be checking back in and just to be reassuring, re-comforting people.
Oh, another one uncertainty that’s really, really important is, is their tech working? Okay, is their tech working? Are they set up safely? Can they sit in comfort, or are you finding that people are not taking care of their physical environment? I.E. desks, that infrastructure that they may have had at work in terms of, you know, those high stand up desks. People don’t have that kind of stuff at home, I’ve heard of people working on their beds.
You know, so you really need to help with that certainty of how can we meet our teams need around that? Another one I really wanna cover on from certainty is assumptions now around stability and capability of their internet connections, because it’s not going too great in some different areas as well. And then also, very much like who’s paying for these internet connections now? Who is covering some of the phone bills for then phone usage? That’s a thing where people might feel really uncertain, so what certainty do you need to be giving as manager, leader, employer for people as well.
So that’s certainty, it was number one.
Covered some variety, then the next big one, significance.
And that’s people want to feel really valued and important. Okay, so that’s things like if you have a large team, let’s say you’ve got 15 or so on a group Zoom, a meeting in your team’s meetings, people aren’t going to feel super significant, so how do you make them feel valued and appreciated as a group, as a collective, as well as an individual? Please work on that one, that is your one-on-ones, that’s little messages, that’s checking in, that’s not overloading with work or expecting or assuming that they’re okay, when they may not be. And to just simply ask, how are you? Would be really, really valuable.
The third and final one that’s really crucial then, is connection, okay?
These are four key human needs that need to be met, and connection is so, so very important because many of us love working in an office environment, that’s why we go to work in that space. Speaking of connection, got a lovely little family walking past, so you’ll hear that noise. So connection is about love and belonging. Okay, so people when they feel in a home environment disconnected, may feel very uncomfortable with that experience and it’s so out of their norm, they get energy, they get excitement, they get variety by being with people in a working environment.
So, how are you now looking to make that need, that important driver for many of us is connection. So please maybe think of little things that are outside the box. So with lunch breaks, you know, yes people can take a lunch break and go eat elsewhere, but you could have some lunch-ins where people can have a bite, have a chat, have a yawn, have a laugh, tell stories, you know, discuss things, just make sure that you’ve got that beautiful workspace connection, care, and nurture going on, not just, you know, you’re now at home, work, do your thing, really be that empathetic leader.
And now, connection may not be your core driver but it could be another of your team member’s.
Significance may not be important to you, but it will be to someone else.
We’re all different, ideally, generally people have one to two as their core drivers and we need to meet all of them.
And you’ll see as the weeks unfortunately to months progress now as remote working environment takes hold, that you’ll see those drivers play out in a really positive, healthy way, then they can also play out a bit less-healthily.
And so you’ll hear significance being met through perhaps some drama, or dissatisfaction or complaining, and you’re gonna start hearing the I, I, I, me, me, me, so get on top of it, be really proactive rather than reactive around those needs because you might just find you can nip things in the bud a lot quicker and more efficiently in the short term, as later, it’s going to take work.
Okay, there’s no short cuts to having more hours in your day, and the more energy you put into your people now, in order to create processes for the future moving forward, it will pay off, it really will pay off. So please, care for your people, show some empathy and compassion around these different situations, and if you’re having any trouble with this, need a hand, wanna find out more about these needs and have a play with it, we can work through yours together too.
Just put a little message below whether you’re watching this now live, or whether you watch it in the re-broadcast please let me know. Love to hear which ones you think might be yours already, you may know, and if you don’t, shout out and we can definitely have a play with that and figure them out. Because you’ll have a good mix across your team, you may already know who’s a little bit more of certainty, who needs more of the significance, so really work with these.
They’re really awesome core needs, come from Tony Robbin’s Six Core Needs.
There’s two more, contribution and growth which are essential as well, but these four, kind of really physical important needs are what I wanted to touch on today. Have a fantastic afternoon, and trust this is really useful.
All the best now, bye.
