As an employer, the Covid-19 pandemic has hit you hard. Just a few short months ago, your industry was booming, you had orders flooding in, and your staff team’s morale was excellent. Fast forward to today, and you are struggling to stay afloat. Rather than letting people go, you want to maximize the productivity of your team to ensure that your business can make it through these months of hardship. The economy is looking uncertain because potential customers are reluctant to go out, spend money, and socialize. To ensure that your staff can remain on your payroll, you may have to diversify or request them to conduct different activities. Take a look at these three sure fire hacks to get the most out of your team.
Flexible Working
To limit your spending on overheads, consider relinquishing the lease on your office. By empowering your team to work from home in a more flexible way as mentioned at https://www.forbes.com/sites/joefolkman/2017/03/02/, you are giving them the responsibility to police their own productiveness. If your startup is heavily online, you can experiment with remote working. The virtual world has opened up meaning that it is just as easy to communicate with someone the other side of the country as it is if they were on the other side of the office. Getting rid of the office overhead means that you can hold onto your staff and keep them on the payroll just that little bit longer. To weather the storm, you need your staff to help you fulfil the orders that you do have and to prepare to be Covid-secure.
At-Home Hacks
If your team have a suite of Macs at their disposal, the chances are that they can take them home. Ensure that they head to a page like https://setapp.com/how-to/split-screen-on-mac-for-extra-productivity to help them learn how to split their screen, in effect giving them two monitors, allowing them to multitask and be more productive. Encourage your team to work from a home office rather than in front of the TV. Hand out a ‘work from home’ pack and foster ideas for productivity in your virtual meet-ups. Acknowledge that procrastination is a real pitfall of flexible working. Be human and recognize it, before allowing your team to share ideas to limit it.
Communicate
Even though we are living through a pandemic, it is still vital that you communicate with your staff. Set up a virtual Skype briefing every Monday morning. Encourage them to offer ideas and listen to their views. Act on the ideas that have merit and give the credit to the individuals responsible for new initiatives and cost-saving measures. Having more exceptional minds working for you means that you have a greater amount of ideas coming forward. Every Friday afternoon, have a team social. This isn’t necessarily for work talk, but to foster a more informal meet-up where you can discuss worries and concerns with your team. This meeting shows your team that you care about them, boosting their morale and productivity.
Follow this guide and you can utilize these three sure fire hacks to get the most out of your team.
