Along with nearly every organisation around the world, the Thinking Ahead Institute was impacted by Covid-19. Almost overnight we found ourselves completely working from home. One of our biggest challenges at the start, other than trying to find an appropriate working space and desk set up amongst family members, pets and partners, was how we could continue to stay connected as a team. Culture is a huge focus for the Institute, and something we quickly realised would be harder to protect and nurture in a virtual world.
Roger Urwin circulated an article from the Harvard Business Review1 which recommended regular team check-ins on both stress levels and work engagement, in the form of scores on a 1-10 scale. How did the scores work? For stress levels, 1 would be relaxed and calm whereas 10 meant the individual was incredibly stressed. For work engagement, 1 would mean very unfocussed, and 10 that the individual was feeling as engaged and motivated as they could possibly be. The difference between these scores would also be important – a net engagement score if you like. The idea was to track these results on a weekly basis to see how they changed, and to monitor that no one’s net score fell to 0 or below, indicating that the individual might need extra support and understanding.
We decided to take on this initiative through a team video call every Wednesday morning, with the aim of sharing our individual scores with each other, and to expand on how everyone was feeling and why. Twelve weeks on we are in a position to look back and see if there are any trends.
The headline result from the scores is that stress (happiness) has averaged 4.2 while engagement averaged 7.4, yielding a net positive score of 3.2 – which we think is pretty good2. Plotting the scores over time shows that individuals do experience variability. We therefore split the 12-week period into two halves. The stress score was unaffected (average of 4.2 and 4.3 for first and second halves respectively), but the engagement score averaged 7.1 for the first six weeks and 7.7 for the second half. In fact, looking at the plot, it was clear that the adjustment was early on. If we split the period into the first three weeks and then the next nine weeks, the average engagement score rises from 7.0 to 7.8.
We are able to add a subjective overlay to this data. From the start it was obvious there was a divide in the team. Some loved home working, while for others it was more stressful, and adding home education to the work and home-life mix was a strain. Those who quickly managed to claim a private work space, with effective desk and screen set up, also experienced lower stress and higher engagement levels than the few left with no option but to bounce around room to room with their laptop on a perpetual hunt for some elusive peace and focus.
We have noted that the stress score overall didn’t really change, but the causes moved from the immediate impacts of Covid-19, to other areas such as a busy work schedules, the government updates on lockdown rules, others’ suffering around the world, and then on to more individual worries like personal health issues, family squabbles, or financial issues.
I had my own struggle with stress levels, as someone with GAD (generalised anxiety disorder) the situation caused a lot of uncertainty which is a big trigger for any anxiety disorder. I had endless questions. Although many of them remain unanswered, being able to plan is a big coping tool for me so as soon as the government would announce the next stage of lock down restrictions my stress would go down. It meant I knew what I was dealing with, even if it wasn’t good news. However the real benefit of using and sharing these weekly scores is that it created open conversations around my challenges, along with everyone else’s, and gave us all an opportunity to get to know each other better as a team, with far deeper insights into personal lives and a much more raw look at the outside-of-work human being behind the professional personas we all knew before.
We tried a similar exercise to the above through a post on our LinkedIn channel, albeit as a one-off rather than time series. We asked if our followers felt more or less engagement with work since the pandemic. This was at three weeks into the national UK lockdown, and a month or more for some globally, so coincided with our own engagement scores rising. No one said they felt less engaged, but, this could be a sampling effect as the less engaged were probably not reading or reacting to business social media posts.
Will we return to how things were before? This seems doubtful to me. But I know for the Institute at least this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When we do get to a position to return to the office we will do so feeling much closer to each other as colleagues, with a clearer insight into each other’s hopes, fears and priorities outside of 9/5 working life, and an aim to capture the benefits some of us have experienced by having more time to spend with family.
View the charts used in this analysis.
- Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2020/03/8-ways-to-manage-your-team-while-social-distancing
- The story is about a difference in the means. We looked at variability and dispersion, but there wasn’t much difference for the two measures. The average standard deviation for each individual’s stress score was 1.1, and for the engagement score 1.0. The interquartile ranges were slightly different; for the stress scores it was 2.2, and for engagement 1.6.