Remote working, when carried out effectively, can offer potential benefits to leaders and their teams; allowing workers flexibility to be able to juggle roles between parenting and working, autonomy over hours worked, lack of commute. From the employer’s perspective, some of the benefits include attracting a wider pool of potential, globally distributed candidates for future positions and saving money in the leasing of office space.

The 2 most major factors in remote working being a success for your company include your ability to excel at positive relationships and support an optimistic explanatory style which leads to a growth mindset.

Positive Relationships build Trust and Well-being

Trust should be the cornerstone of your business communication model, both internally, with your employees as well as externally with clients. Trust is required to persuade your client that you will do what you said you will do. Internally, it is essential that your employees feel valued and safe to be authentic in raising concerns; a requirement for communication to happen.

Building trust remotely requires new skills and training. This may be something that your company has been modelling on a small scale, but some of your team may be caught on the back-foot. How are you supporting them?

Strong communication within your team relies on having strong interpersonal skills as well as developing a structural framework. When the face to face model is no longer an option, how can you build that positive relationship and maintain trust?

Positive relationships are an essential ingredient in maintaining our overall health and well-being. During this lockdown phase, many employees are isolated from their team as well as from family and friends. Leaders who develop ways for the group to connect, will support a sense of belonging within the team, inspiring a level of commitment within the business that is internally motivated. From a health perspective, this connectedness improves the functioning of the vagus nerve, heart, lends itself to character strengths such as curiosity and creativity as well as supporting many other positive health outcomes.

Mindset and Explanatory Style

Whereas those who choose a pessimistic explanatory style, interpret events as permanent and pervasive, optimists will look at the same situation as being temporary and more limited in its effects. Your explanatory style; how you explain events to yourself, contributes to your mindset; whether you believe that the outcome is predetermined based on presented circumstances, or whether you have the ability to see the opportunity through the cracks. It affects your self talk and determines your vision and corresponding willingness to act, for the future of your business.

Optimists with a growth mindset will search for the opportunities in a situation and be open and adaptable to finding a way forward. Examples of this include clothing companies making surgical masks and protective clothing or companies that traditionally make vacuum cleaners, choosing to make respirators. This enhances their brand and we support them.

The question is not whether your skill-set fits this new situation, but what can you and your business contribute to this event? What do people need right now and how can you help them to access this?

What makes some companies more resilient is that instead of pressing the panic button and potentially creating a negative legacy for their brand name, they take a moment to take stock. What is your company’s vision for surviving this adverse time? What are the skills that you and your team need to thrive? How are they going to attain them?

Positive Choice Paris provides remote coaching for businesses:

to develop interpersonal skills that enhance relationships and build trust.
to combat stress and anxiety and increase well-being
To develop an optimistic explanatory style, growth mindset and build resilience

Get in contact for more details on pricing.

Gráinne Dunleavy, MSc Applied Positive Psychology.