LSE Department of Management alumnus, Ben Abbate, Director and Regional Sales Head at Fitch Solutions in Singapore, shares his three duty of care principles for people managers. Read his recommended practice for managing teams in extended working from home conditions during COVID-19.

In my last post ‘Managing extraverts in the time of COVID-19’ I talked about the importance of creating a team weekly cadence to replicate the positive aspects of office life and collaboration.

In this blog, I want to talk about the duty of care that we, as people managers, have during and beyond COVID-19.

What is a duty of care?

The duty of care principle generally applies to company directors to use their investor capital in a wise and judicious manner.

Applied to human capital, this duty of care can be considered the managers responsibility to act in accordance with a high moral and ethical standard with regard to their direct reports.

How can you manifest this duty of care principle during and beyond COVID-19?

As we have seen across the world, the COVID-19 crisis has frayed the bonds of our interconnected society. This has manifested itself in a variety of ways, creating unprecedented stress on our employees. As people managers, we cannot solve or even address many of these issues. However, we can apply the duty of care principle to create safe spaces for our employees to manage themselves through the crisis and beyond.

…we can apply the duty of care principle to create safe spaces for our employees to manage themselves through the crisis and beyond.

Here are three principles that I recommend for you to practice a duty of care:

1. Avoid the positivity trap

It’s natural to want to dismiss or defer difficult questions by ‘focusing on the positive’ – however we know this is a psychologically unsound way to manage a crisis. When difficult questions arise related to commercials, compensation, activity, or even more mundane issues like creaky IT systems or patchy Wi-Fi, consider an empathy-based approach instead.

Rather than asking your team to ‘focus on the positive’ – say instead ‘yes I too have this worry or problem.’ Open the conversation by affirming the issue and create an honest dialogue or discussion on that basis.

Your duty of care includes the requirement that you be honest about what you don’t know and what you can’t solve.

2. Don’t put a time limit on the crisis

A worrying trend I see among my peers and indeed often in the media is a tendency to put timelines on the unknown. We’ll all be back to work in the next financial quarter! International travel will resume in six months!

As a manager, you should avoid this practice.

Instead focus on the steps that are required for the change to take place and facilitate transparent conversations with your business partners. For example, consider bringing in a HR director to explain the steps required to opening an office, or collect and update a trusted source of the latest travel restrictions.

3. Use consistent communication to drive trust and performance

An important element of your practice should be consistency in your communication. In a crisis, it’s tempting to brush aside the usual standards we apply to our messaging and project management, but if you avoid this urge your teams will be stronger for it.

Consistency is the foundation for your team’s psychological safety, and, ultimately their future performance.

I hope these have been helpful behaviours for you to consider in your management practice.

I look forward to discussing this more in future posts and hearing from you in the comments.

Consistency is the foundation for your team’s psychological safety, and, ultimately their future performance.

Learn more about the Executive Global Master’s in Management programme.