Keeping a Team Motivated When Everyone Is Scared

Keeping a team motivated when people are scared for their jobs comes down to being honest, specific and present, in that order. Pep talks don’t work when people are scared for their jobs. What works is telling them the truth about where things stand, giving them clear work that matters, and showing up more often than feels necessary.

After the cuts I described in reducing a support team by 60%, I was left with a smaller team at AudienceView, working from home, with fewer customers, a heavier load per person and a company whose future nobody could promise. Every one of them had watched colleagues leave. Motivation wasn’t a morale-poster problem. It was a question of whether people would keep doing good work while privately wondering if they were next.

I didn’t have a playbook. Here’s what I’d tell another manager in the same position, and what the research I found at the time backed up.

What do frightened people actually need from their manager?

Clarity. Fear feeds on gaps. When people don’t know what’s happening, they fill the silence with the worst version, and that version spreads faster than anything you can say later. A Gallup report published in April made the same point: in tough times, frequent communication, clear expectations and treating people as individuals matter most, and remote workers were three times more likely to be engaged when they got feedback from their manager at least a few times a month.

I read that as permission to over-communicate. I held a short call every day for the whole team, and I used it for the same three things every time: where the business stands, what the priorities are this week, and who needs help. Some days there was nothing new to say. I said so. A manager who shows up with “no news, here’s what I’d watch for” is more reassuring than one who only appears when something has changed.

Be willing to say the uncomfortable thing. People can tell when you’re managing their feelings instead of informing them. If you don’t know whether there’ll be more changes, say that, and say when you’ll know. If leadership has told you something you can’t share, say there’s something you can’t share. They’ll take an honest “I can’t tell you” over a cheerful “everything’s fine,” because they already suspect it isn’t.

How do you give people work that feels worth doing?

By connecting it to something specific that matters. A support team that’s been cut and is working remotely can easily start to feel like it’s just closing tickets. Tell them what the work protects. These customers are venues and organisations fighting to survive too, and a clear, quick answer from your team keeps one of them afloat. That’s not spin. It’s usually true, and people need to hear it.

Give people ownership of something. When a team shrinks, work that used to belong to a colleague lands on someone. Make it a deliberate hand-over, with a name attached and some freedom to improve it. A person who owns the escalation process or the knowledge base has a reason to care that goes beyond the queue. It also builds the skills they’ll need if the business recovers and the team grows again.

Use the quiet time. If volume is down, the team has capacity it didn’t have before. Don’t fill it with busywork. Use it for the improvement work that never got done: cleaning up the knowledge base, fixing the root causes behind repeat contacts, writing the documentation people kept asking for. It’s the problem management work I’ve always argued is the interesting part of a support job. It gives people something to be proud of while the world is on fire.

What do you do about the people who are quietly struggling?

Ask, and keep asking. Most people won’t say they’re struggling in a team call. They’ll say it in a one-to-one, if you make the space and they believe you’ll listen. I moved to a weekly one-to-one with everyone and kept it about the person, not the status of their tickets. Some conversations were five minutes and some were an hour. Both were worth it.

Watch for changes in behaviour. A person who used to joke and has gone quiet. Someone whose quality slips for no obvious reason. An agent who’s suddenly working at midnight. Those are signals, and in a remote team they’re easy to miss. I wrote about the role of job satisfaction last year, and one idea stays with me: people tolerate difficult work far better than they tolerate feeling unseen.

Be generous with flexibility where you can. People are home with children, caring for relatives or worrying about family overseas. A manager who says “start when you can, I care about the result” earns more discretionary effort than one who audits hours. Ask what each person needs, and give them what the business can afford.

What should you do when someone asks if they’re next?

Answer the question you were asked. It will come, usually in a one-to-one, usually from someone who has been rehearsing it. Don’t deflect, and don’t offer a promise you can’t keep. Say what you know: what the current plan covers, what would have to change for the plan to change, and that you’ll tell them as soon as you can if it does. Then ask what they’re worried about. The fear is often more specific than the question, and a specific fear can sometimes be addressed.

Never say “nobody is next” unless you control that decision and are certain. A reassurance that turns out to be wrong costs you every future reassurance. People have long memories for what their manager told them in the worst month of the year, and they’ll measure everything you say afterwards against it.

It also helps to give people something to hold on to that isn’t the company. Skills, references, a better understanding of their own strengths. If someone on your team is going to be better placed for their next job because of the work they did during this period, tell them so. Honest development conversations are a sign you see them as a person with a future, whatever happens to the business.

Should you protect yourself too?

Yes, and managers tend to ignore it. You’re carrying the weight of the decisions, the worry of the team and your own uncertainty, while being expected to look calm. That’s sustainable for a few weeks. Find someone you can be honest with: a peer, a mentor, a friend outside the company. A leader who has no place to put their own fear will leak it into the team without meaning to.

Keep your own boundaries visible, too. If you answer messages at all hours, your team will believe they have to. Set a finishing time and stick to it, and tell people they don’t need to reply to you after it. Modelling rest is a form of leadership during a long crisis, and you can’t do it from the edge of burnout.

How do you know it’s working?

Not from a survey, at least not first. Look at what people do. Do they raise problems early? Do they help each other without being asked? Are the quality scores holding? Do people still disagree with you in meetings? A team that’s gone silent isn’t a calm team. It’s a team that has stopped trusting that speaking up is safe.

Measure the way you always have, and watch the leading signals as well as the lagging ones. A rise in sick days or a fall in participation tells you something before attrition does. I wrote about leading indicators for support teams, and people metrics are the same kind of thing. By the time someone resigns, the number you needed was weeks old.

I’d end with the uncomfortable truth. You can do all of this right and still lose good people. Some will leave because they need security you can’t offer, and that’s a reasonable choice. Your job isn’t to prevent it. It’s to make sure those who stay, and those who go, remember being treated honestly.

A practical test I’d suggest: at the end of each week, ask yourself whether anyone on the team heard something from you that they’d rather have heard from someone else. Rumours travel quickly in a remote team, and a short message that corrects one before it grows is worth more than a long message about strategy. If people are learning about changes from a chat thread and not from you, the channel you’ve built isn’t doing its job.

Notice also what you praise. In a stressed team, people watch closely for what the manager rewards. Praise the person who helped a colleague, flagged a problem early or fixed something that wasn’t their job. Those behaviours hold a team together when the structure around it has been shaken, and a few specific words from you make them more likely to happen again.

Fear doesn’t need you to have answers. It needs you to be in the room.