Sometimes, there is no getting around hard conversations and tough decisions — especially in an economic crisis. Now more than ever, good leadership means facing these moments head-on.

Tech businesses everywhere are feeling the pressure of this global pandemic. Uber announced 3,000 layoffs and 45 office closures . Electric car startup Byton furloughed half of the employees at its North American headquarters, jeopardizing the planned launch of its M-Byte electric SUV later this year. Yelp laid off 17% of its workforce while furloughing another 18%.

When we face the biggest challenges, it’s tempting to duck and run. The prospect of cutting employees or giving up on your favorite projects is painful, and gut instinct is often to find the easiest way out with the fewest possible hard conversations and decisions.

Tough times shouldn’t cause you to avoid reality or make snap decisions, though. More than anything, these are the times when clear communication and straight talk are the most needed.

Transparency must be a priority

Regardless of whether you’re facing fierce headwinds, transparency should be a core value that drives everything you do. This has always been part of the DNA at my company. In good times and bad, we strive to be an open book about company plans and cash positions.

In a downturn, you may not want to share bad news with your team. We’ve all got a little Michael Scott in us — the side that wants everyone to be blissfully ignorant and focus on being a happy work family all the time. Sharing about cash positions, layoff plans, or other organizational changes can seem like the worst possible option.

Layoffs, in particular, are truly hard — especially when you’re friends with the people who are affected outside of work and feel like they’re family. There’s no easy way to handle letting people go.

Instead of just putting your head down and making these tough calls on your own, though, consider how you can seize this opportunity. Rather than closing off and being less transparent, how can you open up even more? If you currently host monthly company meetings, now may be the time to shift to weekly or bi-weekly meetings to keep everyone informed and keep yourself honest.

Jonathan Wasserstrum, the co-founder and CEO of SquareFoot — a tech company that provides online commercial real estate services — works to foster transparency and trust by having biweekly meetings These meetings should be designed to let everyone talk about the business and ask any questions they might have. The best part? This approach encourages people to get involved, offer up solutions, and feel like part of something bigger than their roles alone.

Tough times represent a chance for you to engage your leaders and bring your team together around all the hard choices that need to be made. Choosing to be transparent can leave you with a more aligned and empowered team — even in rough times.

Remember: These are the times for over-communicating rather than pulling back. You don’t want your team speculating about when the next shoe might drop.

Craft your contingency plan

One of the best ways to stay as transparent as possible during a downturn is to publish a contingency plan and communicate about it with your employees often.

At the first sign that things could go south, engage your leadership team to determine a clear, measurable set of potential “tripwires” that might trigger different levels of cuts. These triggers could be related to revenue, the sales pipeline, cash flow, or any other part of the business you and your leadership team determined to be critical.

At Coplex, we use a three-stage contingency plan:

Stage One: If revenue dips below 70% of our target, it triggers 10 percent pay cuts and 15% expense cuts across the board.

Stage Two: If revenue dips below 50% of our target, it triggers additional incremental 10% pay cuts and 5% expense cuts for all departments.

Stage Three: If revenue dips below 40% of our target, it triggers all of the above plus layoffs for idle workers to keep operating loss to no more than 10%.

The exact details of your plan will depend on your business. The critical step is clearly defining those tripwires and establishing what cuts will happen when and if you hit them. You can get creative here, too. Pay cuts of 20% might mean Fridays off for the entire team, or you might look at deferring compensation for higher-paid employees or replacing cash wages with company stock.

Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price, for example, went to each of his employees and asked how much of a pay cut they would be willing to take in the coming months. The company then trimmed salaries based on those answers, and it now has sufficient reserves to keep everyone employed for at least a year.

Did I mention you need to communicate?

Once you have a plan in place, communicate it with your broader team to get everyone on the same page. The goal here is twofold: First, you want everyone to see that you’re planning ahead to keep the company healthy and their jobs secure. Second, you want everyone to work together around the same key performance indicators to avoid hitting the triggers you’ve established.

As you move forward, stay in constant communication with the team. Ramp up meetings and standing calls; don’t pull back and disconnect. Microsoft’s chief digital officer and EVP of corporate strategy have been sending real-time updates to his entire company as the crisis unfolds . The company polls employees before sending the updates to get the information it needs to answer the questions team members have.

When you hit a tripwire, call an all-company meeting to explain where you are and what’s next. Work with your leadership team to define cuts they can agree on across departments, making sure all the leaders are communicating regularly about the status of the situation and the next steps.

Repeat this process every time you face more tripwires, but you must also define steps for undoing cuts and bringing back workers if that becomes an option as business improves.

Companies in the tech industry will face difficult decisions in the months ahead. The leaders who can bring their teams to face the storm together have the best chance of pulling through. Now isn’t the time to duck and run — it’s the time to dive right in.

Why listening to your customers’ needs is key to outlasting the pandemic

Did you know we’re hosting a discussion on the importance of technology in times of economic and societal uncertainty at TNW2020 this year? Check out our session on ‘Innovating to survive’ here .

Back in April, experts from the International Monetary Fund warned global lockdowns are likely to push us into the worst economic slump in years. They weren’t wrong.

A recent survey by the US Census Bureau found a third of businesses reported experiencing an enormous negative effect from the COVID-19 pandemic, with roughly one in 20 owners expecting to shut doors within the next six months. And with a second wave looming over us , things might get even worse.

Although the coronavirus has put a dent in the operations of numerous businesses, a handful of ecommerce companies have experienced a healthy hike in demand. But while dealing with a sudden surge in popularity is a good problem to have, it comes with a whole new set of challenges — and technology could be at the core of solving them.

But what exactly are those challenges and how are tech companies addressing them? We turned straight to some of the world’s leading ecommerce innovators to find out.

“When the pandemic hit, we saw a massive and sustained increase in demand for online grocery service,” says Paul Clarke, CTO at Ocado — the group transforming online grocery with cutting-edge technology and automation. “I suppose the pandemic has provided a very strong validation of our underlying business model, which is a highly automated platform for doing online grocery scalably, sustainably and profitably.”

Over in Germany, CEO and co-founder of Outfittery, Julia Bösch, has experienced a similar boon to her business, which acts as an online personalized shopping platform.

“The shift to online has accelerated massively — by around five years at least,” Bösch says. “And with that, we see new expectations from consumers. Our approach is centered around personalization, and we’ve seen that consumers have valued this more than ever. It will be very interesting to observe how things unfold going forward.”

Across the pond, CTO and co-founder of US-based Poshmark, Gautam Golwala, has also been closely observing and listening to consumers’ evolving needs.

“We didn’t know what to expect when the pandemic first hit us,” Golwala says. “So what we really did as a company is decide to focus on the variables that we do control — stuff like cost, marketing budgets, and so on. But really, what we decided is to understand the needs of our customer during this timeframe, and then focus on speed of execution — a variable that we could really control.”

But paying attention to the needs of customers is only one part of the equation. The more difficult bit is rejigging priorities to adapt to the so-called new normal while also building a future-proof business model.

We often hear anecdotes about the importance of moving agile in the face of adversity, but for Clarke, Bösch, and Golwala it’s also important to combine innovation with a strong devotion to the principles their businesses were founded upon.

If you’re curious to find out more about how these innovators approached these issues, make sure to tune in to our Innovate to Survive panel at TNW2020 , where Clarke, Bösch, and Golwala will go more in-depth about the difficult calls they’ve had to make in order to adapt to the needs of their customers during the pandemic.

Hosted by Financial Times technology editor Malcolm Moore, the session will also touch on a number of issues businesses are faced with, including maintaining their company culture, easing into the new work-from-home reality, and attending to the needs of not only their customers, but also employees.

Work and life should NOT be ‘balanced’

It’s hard to notice oddities in your culture — they just feel “normal.” But there’s nothing universal about what you consider common sense. It’s all shaped by the world you grew up in.

The book American Ways by Gary Althen taught me this clearly. The intended audience is non-Americans who need to interact with Americans, so the book is full of tidbits that make me feel like an alien specimen undergoing examination. Like this:

The book goes on like this, for 300 pages, describing all kinds of behavior I consider normal in clinical terms. It’s mind-bending.

But pay attention to the second example of small talk: what you “do.” Think about that: one of our most common subjects of conversation is, more or less, “what labor do you engage in so that you can earn money?”

This is not universal. In some cultures, the answer to “what do you do?” is to talk about what you do for fun. But here, in North America, we talk about work. That means something, especially in our current “hustle culture” moment.

Which brings me to the idea of work-life balance, as understood by knowledge workers.

“Work-life balance” is kind of a messed up phrase

Picture, if you will, a scale.

Credit: Unsplash

No, not like that. Picture an old-timey balancing scale.

Credit: Unsplash

Yeah, like that. Imagine, if you will, putting your work on one side of that scale. Then imagine putting literally everything else about yourself — your friends, your hobbies, your family, your relationships, your beliefs, your favorite sports team, the movies you like, and so on — on the other side.

Do you think the scale should be tilted evenly?

Balance is a bias

The phrase “work-life balance” is, itself, an argument. Those words put the world into two categories — work and everything else — and imply that these two categories should be given more or less equal weight. And this, mind you, is the phrase used to suggest a healthier alternative to burnout.

I’m not saying we should all stop using the phrase “work-life balance.” Workplaces where employees put in grueling hours, to the point where it’s impossible to have a life outside of work, really are a problem, and all too often, workplace culture reinforces this. It’s easy for that to develop on a team if leadership isn’t intentional about it. I believe most managers and executives who use the term “work-life balance” are trying to make life better for their employees.

Having said that, I think our culture’s obsession with work is easy to ignore, and I think the phrase points to it.

Work and life aren’t opposites

Our culture glorifies work. Most of our TV dramas and sitcoms are set in workspaces. Social media feeds are full of hustlers working long hours in the workplace, then heading home to work on their side hustle. It’s easy to feel like work is the place where you should try to find meaning in life, and that you should constantly be trying to get to the next goal by working harder.

But you don’t have to. You can stay where you are, if your needs are being met. There’s no rule that says you have to advance, or that your business has to keep growing. You can get yourself to a reasonable place, and then stop. Turns out that’s perfectly legal.

That isn’t to say you can’t get satisfaction out of work. You can. I get a lot of joy out of writing and would probably spend a good chunk of every day doing it even if no one was paying me. Every so often, I write things I’m proud of. Sometimes strangers get in touch to tell me it meant a lot of them. It’s a great feeling, and I could imagine spending all of my time chasing it.

But there are other things worth chasing — sunsets, music, conversation, mountains, perfect pets , pizza, friends, laughter, and so much more.

This might seem obvious to you. I, personally, have had to learn this lesson over time, in part by having friends repeat it to me multiple times in situations where it should be obvious.

So I’m learning to put work in its place. I’m setting up guardrails so that I remember to stop working when it’s time. I try to automate busywork, then use the time I free up to do something else. And I try not to use working from home as an excuse to work more often. It’s not about balance — it’s about keeping things in perspective.

Work might be personally meaningful to you, or it might not be. But it’s not who you are, or even necessarily the most interesting thing about you. Work can just be a thing you sometimes do and occasionally bring up in conversation (when the weather isn’t interesting enough, anyway).

This article by Justin Pot was originally published on the Zapier blog and is republished here with permission. You can read the original article here .