Coping as a team of key workers during COVID-19

Professor Greenberg nicely summarised the key point at the end of his video – we want to create supportive workplaces and teams, where colleagues and peers care about and talk to each other, and leaders have a proactive role.

We heard about three stages of support and steps that can be taken – preparing teams, support during a crisis, and recovering teams after a crisis.

1. Teams should be informed as clearly as possible about what is to come, and be encouraged to support each other. For example, through a ‘buddying’ system.
2. During a crisis, support from leaders and managers is critical, as is peer support, while mental health professionals can facilitate this rather than directly providing therapy and interventions (more on this to follow).
3. Coming out of a crisis, active monitoring of staff, reassuring them, maintain an open dialogue, and sharing experiences are important.

This guidance can be clearly applied to Carol’s experience as a manager of key workers. We’d like to examine her experience in more detail alongside the concept of containment.

Let’s pull together a few strands from Carol’s story:

• We heard that Carol doesn’t want to show “weakness” in front of her team.
• She has noticed that members of her team seem angry, upset, or worried and she wants them to be okay.
• We learned that managers and employees can be in the same position: equally worried and uncertain about COVID-19.

Containment

The term containment, when used in therapy, refers to the process by which someone helps us get in touch with overwhelming or difficult feelings and ideas. They do this by first noticing and really listening to our concerns, and then passing them back to us in a more manageable form.

You may recognise this experience. Have you ever met with a manager, colleague, or friend feeling full of worries, “filled up” with stresses – and then come out feeling less anxious, validated, and with a clearer picture? This is because they have made room for our anxieties, just as Susan described earlier.

We may have also had the opposite experience. This can happen when someone makes us appropriately more concerned and attentive to an issue. At other times it happens when someone doesn’t have room for any extra worries, and can’t take our worries in. This is common at times of high stress or crisis, such as the current pandemic.

Imagine, for example, going through turbulence on an aeroplane. You make eye contact with the flight attendant and they are more terrified than you. This would be frightening. You would experience your worries being amplified back at you. This is what Carol told us in week 1 that she is trying to avoid doing this: she doesn’t want to worry her team with her own stresses or vulnerabilities.

But now imagine you see a completely unresponsive flight attendant, with a blank face, oblivious to the turbulence and your concerns. This may also feel ‘uncontaining’. Ideally, the attendant would convey, through words, facial expressions, or gestures that it’s normal to be worried during turbulence, but it’ll pass and that they are there with us through it.

Carol needing to show she is fine and wish that her team could be fine may mean that her team has nowhere to share justified concerns, and so the worries stay with the team, disrupting their work.

Carol has to try to find room in her mind, amid her own worries, to listen seriously to her team’s concerns and validate their feelings. This can be doubly difficult for managers during this time of uncertainty.

In these circumstances we can try to fall back on the example from the supportive flight attendant:

• Taking seriously someone’s concerns – this involves being emotionally affected.
• Sharing someone’s worries – “I’m here to help, and here if you need me”.
• Normalising someone’s worries – “It’s normal/understandable to feel that way” or “It’s ok not to be ok”.

This can often help ‘contain’ difficult emotions rather than not engaging with people’s concerns, dismissing them, telling them they don’t need to feel that way, or promising to fix or take away people’s worries.

The appropriate containment of anxiety can help teams and organisations function properly while looking after staff. However, managers and leaders need to have enough ‘space’ or capacity in their minds to contain this anxiety. This demonstrates the importance of attending to the psychological health managers and leaders so that they are able to meet their own needs and those of their teams.