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In times of crisis, there are essentially three key elements that businesses need to constantly maintain.
One is clarity, in that every key decision, every inevitability and every mitigation process should be open and honest with staff. If they’re going to lose their jobs or face challenging circumstances, the sooner you tell them with enough time to plan and search out solutions the better. The second is obviously to take action. Acting like everything is fine and that an unprecedented global crisis isn’t a big deal is foolish, and actually risks lives. You can’t ignore it, and you can’t simply pretend it’s all going to be fine and soldier on. This is something Executive Grapevine has covered extensively over the past weeks and will continue to report on as details emerge.
Coronavirus | Who are the leaders in taking action?
However, today we’re discussing the third key essential element that all businesses and business leaders must be constantly considering – separating the factual information that is useful and on which plans can be built, and the fiction that circulates online, and inevitably fills the rumour mill within the workforce in times of adversity. It will take only a small rumbling of an issue for one worker or another to start telling stories about their friend’s brother’s neighbour being devastatingly hit by the issue.
Your job as a leader is to stem the thread of misinformation as soon as possible and provide the sources to the information that the business works from, rather than give in to the temptation to proliferate unfounded rumours. For example, various stories have gained virality over the last few days around young professionals taking ibuprofen whilst suffering from COVID-19 and having mysterious reactions to the combination. To make matters more complicated, this has mingled with genuine NHS advice and snowballed into a confused message that has taken workplace chats such as Slack and Teams by storm.
