Humour is laughing despite the crisis

The happy eyes of our twins have made me smile over the last few weeks, but not much else has. During the time of the coronavirus I have not really felt like laughing.

At first glance you might think that my IT company and its ten employees are not affected by the corona crisis, or only marginally. Smarter Business Solutions specialises in digitalisation with Office 365 and serves large customers such as ÖBB, REWE, SIGNA and PORR. Digitalisation has been fuelled by COVID-19 and the sudden need for working from home, and suddenly everybody needs SharePoint, Teams & co. We actually have as much work as before the crisis.

That is nice and very positive, and the fact that a virus is driving digital progress makes me laugh for a moment. But only for a moment. I know that we live in a crisis, and the uncertainty remains whether our clients will still be doing well economically when our invoices fall due. Let’s not kid ourselves. If a large customer extends its payment terms from 30 to 120 days to protect its own employees, what are we supposed to do? The existence of the company would probably be at risk.

But fear for your livelihood is a bad adviser. Liquidity is now the basis of security and more important than ever.

What I own can be summed up in three words: Smarter Business Solutions. For 15 years I have built my whole life around the company. I have never taken anything out of the company for myself. That is why we are now in the fortunate position of having built up some reserves. Despite payroll costs in the mid five figures, we can survive the next three to six months without having to lay off a single one of my valuable employees.

According to the statistic above, we are in quite good shape!

But once this cushion is used up, everything is gone, including private savings and the house. The frightening worst case would bode nothing good. After 15 years of self-employment and huge amounts of taxes paid, I personally would not even be entitled to adequate unemployment benefit, only to emergency assistance. Given these modest prospects, perhaps I can be forgiven for briefly fearing for my family’s livelihood and my own.

But now is not the time to be afraid and freeze! Now is the time to take responsibility!

In my leadership role it is deeply rooted in me that we should use our time meaningfully. In our company culture we are a living system of individuals. On our shared path, everyone should benefit: employees, partners, customers, society. Only when that is achieved is the company doing well too. Following this philosophy, I refuse to preach water and drink wine. That is why Smarter Business Solutions will not use short-time work or subsidies just to shore up a possible profit for 2020 or to protect myself privately. More than ever, I want to stand up for my company and take responsibility. Whether this will turn out well for all of us, we will only know in three to x months.

When laughing is hard, humanity counts!

I have to admit that since the start of the crisis I have counted myself among the “hardliners” in favour of the government’s measures. Not only do I stay at home myself, I also wanted to reprimand everyone on social media who kept indulging their urge to be out in nature. I was firmly convinced that if I, who had been out on the trails every day for the last ten years, could sit quietly at home, then anyone else could too! In my opinion there are simply more important topics right now than mountain photos of your tours on social media. So I perceived everyone who posted a current photo from the mountains or from a run, justified with “it strengthens my immune system”, as a threat to my livelihood (see above).

But that was and is truly a fallacy, and thank goodness I held back from abusing others. Everyone sees the situation differently and deals with it differently, and as long as you do not endanger anyone else, that is fine:

“A small degree of freedom of choice remains to people in every situation, no matter how bad things are for them. With the same history and life situation, people make different decisions. That is something specifically human, and it has an entirely personal dimension. In hindsight you can explain everything, but not in advance.”

Those are not my words; it is the thinking of Viktor Frankl, whom I keep encountering when reading management books (on meaning, vision and values, for example). The paragraph above comes from an interview with psychologist Elisabeth Lukas in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (in German), in which she describes and interprets Viktor Frankl. And it is a paragraph that resolves my personal conflict quite well.

So, in the spirit of #lifeworktrailbalance:

• stay human when judging the actions of others.
• show responsibility towards your employees, partners and customers.
• do not forget your sense of humour, even if we do not feel like laughing every day right now!

Four weeks earlier I looked at the same question from the other side: Using the crisis for change. How the decision against short-time work looked from the outside was written up by Unternehmerweb in May 2020.