How COVID destroyed five years of team culture

As an NHS communications manager, COVID-19 has been my sole focus since the emergence of the virus at the beginning of the year. An unheralded and destructive force, it has ripped through communities, destroying lives and livelihoods. The unanticipated consequence for my amazing team of communication professionals is the erosion of our team culture which took five years to build…

Happy families

I decided early in my career that the management style I preferred was person-centric, gentle and supportive. I don’t like unnecessary formality or hierarchy and it’s always been astonishingly obvious to me that you get the best from people when they are happy, motivated, engaged and positive.

So as I took on this role around five years ago, I was deliberate in forming a team with this culture at its heart. As my team grew, each new recruit was indoctrinated into this culture and it paid dividends. Our team is well regarded, known not only for creativity and professionalism but for going the extra mile, being the ‘go-to’ team when it just has to get done. I’m proud of that. Happy families. But COVID-19, like a Shakespearean antagonist, has entered stage left to chip away the foundations I worked hard to build…

Smug in a crisis

If I’m honest, I enjoy a crisis. It’s one of my favourite parts of my job — reacting to contain a damaging story or control a narrative. When there is something at stake it is exhilarating.

I’ve dealt with a few crises over the years, my best work is often unseen and unknown (if I do my job well). But COVID-19 was different.

The opening stanza was similar to many other public heath crises I’ve helped to manage. Crisis management is formulaic really, you have to act quickly, gather information, make communication accessible and agile. We did all this when the pandemic began, ensuring our clinical frontline understood national guidance, keeping patients informed about the logistics of their treatment. We introduced new channels and regular bulletins. We were as proactive as we could be.

Even as lock down began we were in good shape. I’ve always given my team the freedom to work from home if they wanted or needed to, so we were already set up to work in multiple locations with no disruption.

I was smug about this. There were teams across the NHS scrambling to adapt and we were a beacon of modernity, zooming before it was cool. So as the nation locked down, I sent my team home and told them I’d cover the office. They made me proud, working from home to the same high standard, coming in to support where necessary, adapting to the new world.

A coal away from the fire grows cool

Of course, cracks began to appear. I was concentrating so hard on keeping things running in the office that I couldn’t see what was unfolding. Every day brought a fresh operational challenge and I thought that the best way to protect my team was to shoulder this burden. Do as much as possible so they could be at home away from the very real threat of the virus.

But I wasn’t giving my team the attention or support they needed.

I see now that I have always relied on proximity to support team culture. It’s always felt easy because it was; when my team were there beside me I could sense their cues, ask them how they were, keep them informed. But separated from them, I just didn’t make the time to do this properly.

I’d like to tell myself it was because I was swamped, but that’s an excuse, I simply didn’t do enough.

This began to manifest itself in how engaged people were in their work. At no point did they fail to deliver, but I could sense they weren’t invested in the same way. Work became transactional, task-based. Our usual creativity was muted and it felt to me that we weren’t connecting as people. It felt like our culture was dying. I felt as though I had failed my team.

Culture is a garden

As I reflect, I know I could have done more but I can’t change the past. We have all been changed by the pandemic. Being at home is hard. Being at work is hard. It’s all hard. What I can do is learn from what happened.

I used to think of ‘culture’ as a building. Lay the foundations, get the structure right — and the edifice of culture juts out of the landscape, firm against the storm.

But I was wrong. Culture is a garden, organic and changing with the seasons. It requires cultivation and attention, the work is never finished. But the beautiful thing about a garden is that even after it has been cut back to the roots, it can grow again.

Repairing culture

I’m seeing the green shoots of our culture emerge again. I know I have to do my part to tend the garden. That means regular calls and meetings. No assumptions. It means providing structure. It means saying thank you over and over again — it doesn’t matter if they are tired of being thanked. It means reflecting back to my team how their work makes a difference.

As we teeter on the precipice of a second wave, it’s all started to feel rather sisyphean…COVID-19 will never end…I will be sending messages reminding people to socially distance and sanitise their hands forever…pushing a dreary grey boulder up a hill only to watch it tumble down again as the R number spikes.

But whatever happens, I will no longer rely on proximity to sustain culture. It’s been a painful but important lesson to learn.