Right now a lot of business owners find themselves leading through anxiety. It appears disruption from COVID-19 will be ongoing. As you look to get through the rest of 2020, you may need to reengage your employees.
For some, the adjustments made in March were charming but now they’ve become limiting. How do you get your team’s productivity back to what it was in January?
Because with a lot of employees working from home, you can’t expect productivity to stay the same. Very few are working in a bubble that is free from distractions and interruptions. Here are a few ways to boost at employee productivity during COVID-19:
Reduce the Workload
You can reduce an employee’s workload and increase efficiency. When working from home, an eight-hour a day employee may not be able to produce eight hours of work, especially if taking care of children and helping with virtual school are part of the mix.
When leading through anxiety, it may be more realistic to ask for something like 85% of an employee’s normal productivity. While you may not love it, this is a situation where you’ll need to take some work or projects off their plate.
Less work will be done but you may get more consistent productivity.
Introduce Flexibility
Maybe you need 100% of work to be done but you’ll need to show some flexibility to achieve it. In this scenario, you have employees figure out their own schedules in order to achieve your desired productivity.
While the productivity will be high, it may be harder to gather your team for things like conference calls, as people may be working very early or late, as well as checking out for large blocks of time to help with children.
When the workday becomes blurry, there’s also the danger of burnout. You want to empower and not enslave your team with a workload that feels unrealistic.
Triage Teams
You may not have the time to oversee every employee’s productivity, while from working from home. Taking people out of the office often leads to new questions, challenges, and concerns.
Consider putting people into triage teams or accountability groups. The goal is to have the group brainstorm or address any challenges and then pick a course of action.
For example, you may have several people who do similar jobs and one may be falling behind on important tasks or things that turned out to be harder than expected.
With the team approach, the other members pitch in to help the swamped member. The goal is to make sure the group stays as productive as possible. You’re hands-off with this process, as you’re only concerned with the end result.
This triage approach works best when you have a motivated group of people, who feel that everyone is already pulling their weight. The focus is on making sure the team’s goals are achieved. This strategy probably won’t work if some employees are considered lazy.
Ken Okel Performs Virtual Keynotes Too
