How To Stay Positive About Work and Your Career During COVID-19 (Coronavirus)

Between working from home, being quarantined from friends and family, and having to change your business plans for the immediate future, uncertainty is at an all-time high right now. Developing and adapting new sales and marketing strategies is important in order to maintain normal business practices. But, there are aspects lots of business professionals overlook. Everyone is facing the same issue. We all need to take a step back for a moment. Do the things that help you stay positive during COVID-19.

Even though we can not go out and socialize with our friends and family, it is important to get some fresh air and sunshine. Whether that is grocery shopping, going for a walk (if permitted in your area), or simply sitting on your porch. In order to keep your employees, customers and yourself positive you need to work harder to keep yourself positive and adapting your techniques.

5 Tips for Staying Positive During COVID-19

1. Just Keep Swimming (Stay Positive)

It is obviously important to keep a positive attitude in day-to-day business. As no customer wants to deal with someone who is not easy to talk to or is negative. As we are all experiencing, it is much harder to stay positive during COVID-19 as it was at the beginning of 2020. Whether your normal routine of the gym, family/friend outings, or vacations were affected, we all need to adapt. Taking a moment to yourself and clearing your mind of what is happening in the world, what the stock market is doing, what your business is doing, or even what is happening in social media, is extremely important right now.

Once a day we all need to take some time to ourselves and go do something that makes us happy, and lets us forget about our surrounding environment. It is okay to be selfish for a moment and worry about yourself, because if you don’t, you will burn out and you won’t be able to help anyone else. So, before you run out into the business environment to find out how you can help your company’s marketing, sales, or another aspect of the business, ensure you have a clear focused mind. 

2. How Can You Help?

Now let’s attack the business world and how you can help your company navigate this unknown environment. There is no roadmap or secret sauce recipe that will work for everyone, but there are steps you can implement to continue engaging your audience, reaching out to potential customers, and building your existing relationships with your clients. As there is no roadmap to conversing with clients during this crisis, there is also no roadmap to changing your team dynamic overnight.

But, there are a few things we can do that can make business work as normal as possible and bring the team dynamic back to what it was in the office. By keeping your clients up to date on what your team is working on and keeping a clear line of communication open, you can strengthen the relationship with your clients. Also, by working on ways that work best for you and your team to keep the team dynamics alive, you keep morale up and help to not isolate your employees. 

3. Update Your Newsletter During COVID-19

Even before COVID-19 hit everyone’s inboxes were flooded with emails, now there is more than usual. With inboxes pumped full of crisis-related subject lines it’s difficult to ensure that your critical messages are seen and read. The goal is to make sure your newsletter has a combination of relevant information and creative elements to make engaging content. Your newsletter is even more important during an unprecedented time to give confidence in your company and that you and your team are still working hard to help your clients and make improvements. Ensure you keep consistent communications whether that is continuing your weekly or monthly newsletters or update emails. Communications should not waver and business should appear as normal with regular updates. This keeps the regular habit of your current clients or will build habits of new clients. 

4. Teamwork Makes The Dream Work

As the world gets more used to working from home, each company has had to face different obstacles. I know we have had some adjusting to get used to the new way we have to work and communicate as a team in order to reach our goals. Every team is different and needs different systems in place in order to work well as a unit. This can look very different for each company as some teams may use more frequent meetings to update one another, use group chats, or leave notes for one another as updates on contracts for customers.

One way you can improve the team morale and get everyone on the same page is through frequent video meetings for coffee or lunch to continue the sense of comradery, and to get everyone involved and up to date. This can be a fun experience, as some video conferencing applications allow you to change your background or input elements into your video and lighten the mood of your team. You can also implement a weekly meeting on Friday afternoon for a “happy hour” over Zoom to catch up on everyone’s workflow for the week, have a beverage and catch up on what would have been the social aspect of working in an office. Working together is almost as social as it is professional and with one aspect of the ratio missing it can throw the team off and make them feel isolated, bring the team together and keep spirits high.

5. You’ve Got Mail

By using email for not only your newsletter (as mentioned above) you can also use it to keep your team together and update them on changes within the company. As everyone’s inboxes are overflowing and there is a lot to sort through, having some news that is very relevant to your team is welcome. Update your team on meetings, when other meetings are and try and bring a sense of excitement into the newsletter. Potentially add themes to your Friday Happy Hour meetings (beach vacation, ski trip, etc.) and allow your team to blow off some steam and get a change of scenery (even if it is digital). 

What This Means

It is very important to stay positive during COVID-19 and is always something everyone works on in normal day-to-day life, creating that work-life balance and trying to build your professional portfolio but also enjoy life. This has never been more important than it is today. Working from home can be tough, ask anyone. Even if you are one of the lucky ones that have a home office and a space to work it can still make you miss navigating that awful traffic to get to work just to get outside your four walls.

Striving to keep yourself motivated and to stay positive during COVID-19 can be achieved by taking some time to yourself every day to relax and step back from your work to do something you enjoy. As management or even as a team member the company depends on you maintaining your mental health and positivity. They depend on you. Not only because they need you to continue your work output but because you are part of the team dynamic and the team needs you. There are many ways you can continue this to stay positive during COVID-19. Find what works best for you and strive to help others during this time because we need one another to come out the other end not only as a business but as a community.