As we enter the third month of our new normal in the age of COVID-19, organizations and their teams are facing postponed or cancelled face-to-face events, reduced resources, and a huge amount of uncertainty. May is also Mental Health Month, and Mental Health America, the organization behind this annual observance, offers a reminder that everyone faces challenges in life that can affect their mental health and can use tools to increase resiliency.

As a leader, here are four things you can do right now to give your staff a sense of certainty and focus.

Set Priorities

Setting short- and long-term priorities will allow your team to be laser-focused on what’s important to your association. It also reduces uncertainty at a time when so much is uncertain. At the American Urological Association, where I work, we began setting 14-day priorities to help us focus our staff effort and resources.

Our initial priorities included getting information to our member physicians on the policies coming out of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, insurance issues, and pending state and federal legislation. Our next set (only seven days later) involved reviewing our programs and issuing telehealth how-to’s and FAQs specific to our members’ specialty. We’ve continued this process weekly.

Clarify Possibilities

Staff are more resilient when they are ready for a range of possibilities. So, if you’re not quite sure whether you will have that August event or when you will return to your headquarters, develop “what-if” scenarios. For our August meeting, staff know that we have options to cancel, hold a hybrid virtual and in-person event, or offer all-virtual content.

Setting short- and long-term priorities will allow your team to be laser-focused on what’s important to your association.

Stop Doing Certain Things

Ask your team what they are doing that just doesn’t make sense right now. For example, our advocacy team has a successful fellowship program placing a member in a congressional office. Staff develop marketing plans to recruit for nominees, identify local living arrangements for the fellow, and make calls to congressional offices to place the fellow. With mandatory stay-at-home orders, we identified this as a program worth delaying and redirected staff away from working on this program toward items on our priorities list

Ask Questions, Give Answers

As you revisit your priorities and decide what programs and work are inside and outside of your priority window, ask questions and provide answers. Talk about goals, financial implications, allocation of staffing resources, and deadlines. Provide history and background information to facilitate decision making. These discussions give your team certainty about the direction of the organization.

Managers often complain that they don’t have time to provide this direction. Instead, they tend to deal with the crisis in front of them, giving direction through a quick email or text and eventually following up if staff are focused on the wrong tasks or if they need something different than their staff provides. Team morale may plummet when employees must repeatedly spend time clarifying what they should do and make back-end fixes to work they’ve already done.

Instead, managers should routinely ask questions to get team input. A few of my go-to questions in team meetings:

• What’s keeping you up at night?
• What do we need right now for our team, for our members?
• What are we doing that just doesn’t make sense right now?
• What are our goals (for example, increase revenue, decrease expense, weigh outcomes)?
• How does this impact staff (for example, do we need realignment to another project)?
• What are we 100 percent certain about?

Taking these steps today can position your team to thrive despite the many unknowns that lie ahead.