Supporting you
BUSINESS SURVIVAL & GROWTH
THROUGH COVID-19 & BEYOND
EMPLOYEES
Start with your employees. Employees are the life blood of the business and not focusing on them now will slow the business recovery. Participative, driven empowered employees key to surviving times like this, they are also likely to be your biggest cashflow cost.
Furlough Employees
Options to Offer Employees
Openly (drop the barrier of rhetoric).
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Listen and ask.
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Communicate what you do know and say what you don't.
People fill in the gaps of what you don't say, by assuming the worst or discussing it over and over with colleagues, distracts people from moving forward.
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Acknowledge what's bad, then your team will believe you when you say what's good.
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Communicate what it means or might mean for your team.
This is your teams' first priority, if you don't cover this first then they won't be listening to what you say about the business, they'll be mentally distracted on their own concerns.
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Absence of communication leads to speculation, stress, assuming the
worst, and an absolute loss of productivity.
Communicate (the when)
As a whole team or smaller teams (4-8).
Have a chairperson.
Keep in Touch
with Furloughed Employees
Employees can be furloughed more than once, for a min of 3-weeks each time.
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If needed, you can furlough yourself as directors.
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More advice on furloughing employees here.
A 3-4 day week
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An unpaid sabbatical
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20% temporary pay reduction
(received better if directors take more than a 20% pay reduction)
Communicate and keep communicating.
We often believe we saving our teams from stress by not communicating till we know 'definite', yet feelings of lack of control and uncertainty caused by lack of information, are the biggest causes of stress.
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Saying what you don't know will not undermine your teams trust in you. New understanding has blown through that old school authoritarian control management, the myth of the manager who has all the answers is gone. Build trust by being real, not asking your teams to believe in a myth that doesn't exist.
Communicate (the how)
Daily Video Meet
Arrange Zoom meets by team or create groups.
Key to keep in touch, support each other, maintain connections.
Working & Childcare
As an employer, be flexible and put aside (for now) the rule 'you can't work and look after children'.
Where we need our teams to keep working, where teams want to support their company, we all need each other. That means, we're finding new ways of working flexibly and productively, doing our jobs and looking after our children.
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Gov advice is, you can furlough employees who have small children and they consider they cannot work.
Working from Home
= ++ Productivity
Trust your teams.
Not to trust your teams will cost you your valuable time and your teams motivation.
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Shorter more productive hours.
Out go unproductive meetings; water-cooler chats; office politics; energy taking commutes and school runs.
Recruiting More?
If you're experiencing an increase in demand, consider recruiting and employing via an agency.
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A specialist contact centre, adopted this solution. Higher demand for 111 calls meant they were brought in to help. They had limited extra capacity and still wanted to help, this was their solution. Agency teams gave them:
- Flexibility
- Faster recruitment of numbers
- Agency takes on the payroll onboarding
Gov Advice for Employers
Guidance for employers and businesses on coronavirus here.
Learning & Development
For furloughed or part-occupied teams, they may be keen to online:
mentor
reverse mentor
lite appraisals? linked to online learning tools?
online learning (lots free)
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A positive way to develop, look to the future and get ready for starting business again.
PREPARING YOUR TEAMS for the FUTURE
Involve Your Teams
In suggestions for the business to adapt to 'new now' and getting ready for the future.
