For many of us, it’s been almost a year of working from home. And if you’re feeling burned out, exhausted, and anxious, you’re certainly not alone.
Frances Frei, a professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School, has dealt with her own demanding job and a family member with the coronavirus, and notes that many of us are dealing with a “persistent level of anxiety.”
“Right now we’re working in a pandemic, and remotely. I think in the future, we’re going to be working a lot more remotely, hopefully a lot less in a pandemic. That persistent level of anxiety … I think, [is] the most important part to address right now,” Frei said at Fortune‘s virtual Reimagine Work Summit on Wednesday.
Pick your priorities
When it comes to ensuring we’re actually able to optimize our performance at work and not merely slog through in these hard times, Frei has a rather unusual approach: Decide what you’re going to be good at and what you’re going to have to be bad at.
“The number one advice that I have for people is, pick a couple of things that you’re going to be great at, and really let the others go,” she says. “I really think that persistent anxiety means we’ve got to pick just a couple things to be good at, and then the rest of them, we have to have a lot of grace and forgiveness for ourselves.”
In terms of how that works, practically, Frei has some tips (read: don’t just call your boss and tell them you’re going to start being bad at things.) She suggests having conversations about what the team (or your boss) really needs from you.
She suggests to ask: “‘What does the team need from me in this week, in this day, in this month? What can I do even more of and then what does that mean I have to give up?’,” says Frei. “I would have that conversation with the people you work with: ‘Where do you need us to really kill it, and then let’s reverse engineer what we can give up in order to sustain that.'”
Building a ‘resilient’ culture
To be sure, in a time when “workplace culture” mainly consists of interactions on video calls or over workplace chats, a lot is bound to get lost in translation.
Frei suggests “we need to build resilience into our cultures like never before,” because “if it’s not a pandemic, it’s going to be something we want to be prepared for.”
To Frei, that means building a culture on trust. “If we have a reservoir of trust, you’re going to get the benefit of the doubt: If we have to bounce back, if somebody has a bad day, if something goes wrong, we’re like locked arms and we can come back from it.”
But building that trust in the workplace is going to take some old fashioned empathy, argues Frei—something that’s become a lot harder when you’re only a face on camera. Frei notes “If I’m in a room with you, I’m making eye contact, the chair I sit in could be right next to you, I could get up and get you a cup of coffee—I have all these micro actions I can do to reveal empathy, and on Zoom, it’s only my words.”
So instead of just asking brush-off questions like, “How are you?” to coworkers, dig a little deeper: “So, ‘how are you doing,’ and you say, ‘I’m doing fine,’ and I’m like, ‘It sounds like the schools in Cambridge are never opening again. How is that working out for your family?’ I just have to do something to get you to engage so I can see all the micro signals,” she says.
Adds Frei: “We have to do some prodding, some sanding, so we can see the stuff that we would normally see in a physical environment.”
