That time our Appreciative Workplace saved EnCompass
Author: Kathy Callahan
It can be hard to imagine what an Appreciative Workplace really looks like under pressure. But I often think back to one moment at EnCompass when our appreciative practices didn’t just shape the culture—they helped carry us through a crisis.
It was 2020 and EnCompass’ business was booming. We had numerous contracts, a great reputation with clients and partners, and had recently won the Best Workplaces honor from the Washington Post. Most importantly, we were making an impact through our work on global health, hunger, gender-based violence, democracy and educational outcomes, and more.
Then came March 2020. The COVID pandemic was leading to a lockdown—all travel was cancelled, we were confined to our homes. Panic ensued in our industry, with many of our partners moving to 4-day workweeks or immediately furloughing staff. I still remember the Diet-Coke-chugging, anxiety-ridden VP from one of our partner organizations, saying definitively that getting staff off the payroll was his most urgent priority.
But at EnCompass, first, we took a collective deep breath. Then we followed our appreciative inquiry principles:
Image and action are linked.
We had always understood the importance of co-creating a vision of success and holding it as our North Star. We understood that this vision was motivational for all of us, and it aligned us for the work, and the workplace we wanted to build. In this moment, it was critical to re-create that vision for this tumultuous time. We knew our COVID-era vision had to contain these elements:
Protecting our staff—their health and wellbeing, which during those scary days definitely included keeping their jobs and their health insurance
Continuing our critical work in the world, which was only getting more critical because of this global pandemic
Keeping EnCompass thriving through this crisis and beyond
Building on the best of the past and focusing on strengths.
EnCompass had so much expertise to draw upon, across many different fields. One relatively small group of professionals were early experts in virtual Instructor Led Training—that is, in designing and delivering our learning and leadership programs online. We set to work at once, building on those strengths—we trained everyone in the company for some online role—production, facilitation, and design. We offered demos to clients to convince them to pivot the work online. We offered coaching to staff as they stepped into these new technologies.
Don’t get me wrong: this was a huge, heavy lift, particularly for the small group of people who were training, coaching, demo-ing, and delivering, seemingly around the clock—but we were united by that vision of keeping EnCompass, our important work, and our staff safe through this crisis—so we made it happen.
We move in the direction of the questions we ask.
Generative questioning is another key aspect of our appreciative workplace approach. While my Diet-Coke-wielding colleague was asking: How much money can we save if we furlough people? How much money can we save if we move to a 4-day work week?, our questions were more possibility-focused:
What would it look like to provide exceptional technical assistance online?
How might we engage in robust data collection remotely?
How might our finance team continue its work from home? What would it take to store the records safely and confidentially?
We leaned on our creative staff to come up with answers to these generative questions, and their innovations were impressive.
What we focus on, grows.
This is a fundamental aspect of the Appreciative Workplace. It would have been easy to focus only on the fear, the panic, the urgency of learning so much and pivoting so quickly, the burnout we were experiencing while we tried to keep our work, our company, and most importantly, our families afloat during this time.
But as appreciative practitioners, we understand that what we focus on, grows. What did we want to grow more of? We wanted to grow more wellness for our staff. So we invested in additional resilience benefits, bringing in wellness experts, holding virtual coffee chats, more team meetings, online yoga—really we were “holding each other” through this trying time. We wanted to grow more impactful work, so we focused on honing our online skills and continuing to provide exceptional service.
And that’s the thing about an Appreciative Workplace.
People sometimes imagine it as something “extra”—something nice to focus on when times are good. But for us, it became most visible when things were hardest.
The appreciative workplace didn’t distract us from the crisis. It helped us move through it. It gave us a shared vision, a way to stay connected to one another, and a foundation strong enough to support creativity, resilience, and action under enormous pressure.
And somehow, through all of that uncertainty, we not only protected our staff and our work—we continued to grow.