Author: Alexandra Wiggins

●  Put Your Best Thoughts Forward

●  Coach Support

●  Be Specific in Communication Motivation is no small thing.

It’s an achievement during the good times. During the hard times, it gets even harder. The COVID-19 crisis has tested what the best leaders have to offer. Some have been able to reroute and are now working virtually. Others are working on the front lines in person. Wherever and however you work, leadership matters.

Leadership is what keeps teams together in times of crisis. It’s how people overcome the odds. It’s how they achieve things they didn’t think were possible as a group.

The Effects on Business

COVID-19 has taken a toll on businesses of every size. Many are closing, but many will also weather this storm. For those who are open, business has been much slower than usual.

Confusion

One of the worst things that has come to businesses in the crisis is confusion. People don’t understand exactly how they will make it through this. Will the business be the same? How much will it have to adjust? Will things return to normal?

A Slowdown

For many people, business simply will not go back to normal. Things are slowing down. They will stay slow for a long time. It’s hard for employers to keep people on payroll. They have to make painful cuts.

Fear

A great many people are worried about their job security. The fear that they are experiencing can cause people to get stuck in a rut. Their sense of normalcy has been destroyed. They are distracted and worried. Their job performance can suffer.

What Leaders Can Do

Thought Is Power

Your ability to empower your team is directly related to how much thought leadership you can display. Bring your A-game every day when it comes to thought leadership. Your employees are relying on you for direction in action and attitude.

Make sure you send them in the right direction.

Be Honest

Honesty is brutally hard during times like this. It’s hard to deal with realities of lower income, layoffs, and performance issues. What you can be honest about without getting your team down is the true positives.

You might have to look hard. But celebrate the everyday victories. Remember that if you’re having a hard time, so are they. Tell the truth about the good things you see, and open their eyes.

Be Empathetic

Empathy is a prized characteristic. But we don’t always coach it in leaders. During times like this, you may have to brush off some skills you aren’t used to using.

People normally look to leadership to manage things. They know that leadership is looking for achievement. But when things get this bad for people’s health, they are looking for emotional intelligence as well. Realize that people are struggling.

When you show empathy, you are encouraging your team to have some as well. Act with character and kindness. You want your team to have a great example to learn from.

Coach Support

Help your team help themselves. Teams can get into downward spirals without leadership that coaches support. It’s important that your team members look out for one another.

Set a good example. But also reward when other people step up to the plate. A great coach notices people’s small achievements as well as their large ones.

Be the Best Communicator on the Team

You have the power to change your team’s communication style. Everything doesn’t have to be sugar and spice. Clear, concise, and actionable communication is also supportive of people’s well being. They are confused during this time. They can’t guess very much about what’s next.

When you lead with great communication, you make everyone’s job easier. They will have more energy to support and cheer each other on during this crisis. They will also have actionable steps to succeed with.

Great SEO management takes updating, and that usually means often! The great thing is that there are lots of tools out there to help you keep your web pages optimized. You can optimize for a lot of things, but one of the most important things to do is optimize for speed.

Fast pages rank better with Google, but they are also more usable. On average, pages in the United States take somewhere around 9 to eleven seconds to load across major industries. A very few are in the eight or 12 second range.

Get Your Site Tested

Before you decide which page to optimize first, get your site tested. There’s a lot of great software out there. Just take your pick and get started! Pingdom is an easy one to use that will check per page for you. It’s the best option for people who update their pages frequently.

Check Your Code

One of the major ways sites become slow is with cumbersome code. Usually, the culprit is either clunky JavaScript or redundant CSS.

Some basic things you can do with your developer are to lighten up the JavaScript and to resize images with CSS so that they easily fit your page width.

All in all, you want the JavaScript to be as lean as possible. This may mean having some interactive features revisited. It can also mean checking up on your animation to see if it’s really necessary.

After that, you want the CSS, or cascading style sheets, to be well-organized and very neat. It may seem obsessive when you see how neat people try to make their style sheets, but neatness makes all the difference in the world when it comes to page load times.

Fixe 404s

These little guys are the enemy of page speed. Fix them pronto to boost your rankings! There’s not much to it: simply delete empty URLs, or issue a 301 redirect to another page on your site.

Cache Your Page

This is an easy thing you can do no matter how large your website is. It will cause your page to be saved when people load it.

Use Accelerated Mobile Pages

These are pared-down versions of your page that load on mobile. You can use a WordPress plugin if you don’t have a developer to fix you up with AMPs.

Use Minification

This is a surefire way to make the page load faster. Essentially, minification means to strip data from the browser that you don’t need. It strips unnecessary and redundant data to help the page load smoother.

Check Your Plugins

Minimizing is the goal here. You clean out plugins just like you clean out a closet! Take a hard line and delete any that you don’t really need, because they will all slow your site down at least a little bit.

These things may seem small, but they have a huge impact on page speed. Remember that pages load differently on different devices. Get your website tested across browsers and devices to get an accurate picture of how the pages are loading. If you stick to it and optimize a little every week, you won’t have to do huge yearly overhauls.

Overall, the key is to keep it lean on the website. Lean code, clean browsers, and light plugins are the way to go. If you have a really hard time getting the page load time down, you will want to check on getting a different host. But usually, the biggest thing is cleaning up JavaScript and CSS. After that, it depends on what you have on your website and if it’s mobile-ready.

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. It forms the foundation of all the code you see on the web. Without HTML, we wouldn’t see any of the style and design from CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets.

You can wrap a lot of things in HTML. HTML is essentially a tool for putting content on the web, so you can wrap your general printed content in it. But you can also embed videos, images, and audio files using HTML.

HTML is powerful, but it isn’t interactive. You need JavaScript to make your pages interactive on the web. So HTML will make pages and forms, but you can’t send any information without JavaScript and usually a bit of PHP.

People learn HTML all kinds of ways. There are some great books on the subject. But you can also sign up for an online course like Codecademy. Some people even learn HTML by tinkering around with a text editor like Atom and viewing the source code on their favorite web pages.

HTML is not too hard to learn, but it requires a certain amount of attention to detail to use efficiently. If you’re interested in learning HTML, try one or more of the methods mentioned above. You can also look through the World Wide Web Consortium’s tutorial, also known as the W3Schools Tutorial.

Many people use HTML for creating emails these days in addition to web pages. It’s a great format for creating personalized emails and emails with lots of images. HTML has a lot of structure and syntax. This provides the basis for the organization of web pages and some mobile apps.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed weaknesses in all of us. Now is the time to rise as leaders. Whatever shortcomings people may have in the face of a crisis, they can still overcome challenges successfully as a team.

COVID-19 has forced many unprepared people to work from home, and it has caused pre-existing work relationships to fray as people worry about their future. Leading in the face of this crisis means tackling complex issues and working with psychology.

People need strong leadership in order to achieve when times are tough. Already, people are comparing the economic fallout of the pandemic to the Great Depression. Standout leaders in this situation will draw upon the strengths of their teams to tackle obstacles.

Here are a few things leaders can do to bring out the best in their people.

Be Clear, Kind, and Consistent

Stress makes every instruction more difficult to absorb for many people. The chaos of the pandemic doesn’t help. Remember the 10X10X10 rule here, and keep a kind tone.

Kind can mean a lot of things. But in a difficult pandemic where efforts go overlooked, it often means sharing people’s stories and highlighting their hard work. Taking care not to show too much favoritism and to share the praise, make sure to detail how your teams overcome.

Keeping the Goal in Mind, Set Clear Boundaries

People need structure when it comes time to tackle chaos. It’s just not very organized working in a pandemic, and there’s no way around it. Make sure that you clearly define your goals and schedules for your teams during this stressful time.

Unknowns increase anxiety and can waste valuable time. People who are working during this pandemic are under very strict time constraints in many cases. You can help your team as a leader by staying the course when it comes to schedules and protocols.

This is helpful because in the long run, these things promote efficiency. Even if it takes a little more time to get everyone up to speed at first, everyone achieves more when structure prevails during a crisis.

Keep the Mission in Mind

Whatever business you’re in, keep your reason for being there front and center. Employees need a focus on well-being during times of crisis, and part of that is knowing why they are there.

Reminding people that they have a purpose that matters is key to promoting a sense of calm and well-being when disease ravages an economy.

Lead with Empathy

Everyone needs a little help on the mental wellness front during scares like this. Being a strong leader doesn’t always mean playing the tough guy. Although some toughness doesn’t hurt when pandemic hits, try not to make too big a point of it.

You can model the values of your team by sharing concern for your employees. When they see how you are acting, they will know that it’s okay to care during this stressful time. The support keeps teams communicating well and working toward a common goal.

Be a Strong Communicator

Beyond being clear and consistent, you need to be one of the top communicators on your team. Don’t just give instructions and then check out while people struggle for time. Communicate more than others. Your example will help keep team members in sync with each other.