How to equip your team to withstand a financial crisis in 2022
It’s the unknown that scares us the most. Amidst a morass of uncertainty, people look for stability; the lifeboat breasting the wave.
If you’re a business owner or a leader in a managerial role, then it’s to you that employees look for reassurance – even when there’s none to be had.
Often it doesn’t matter that you’re simply not in a position to tell them everything will be OK, because you don’t know that it will be – but taking the time to be open and honest and to say so will, in its own way, be a positive.
Say nothing, and you allow an information vacuum to form, and it will soon fill with gossip and rumour, none of which will be helpful in steering through a crisis.
So how do you equip your team to withstand a crisis? The time to start is now, when there is no crisis. It’s about building the right kind of management style.
1. Personal contact: We’re aware of one IT company that adopted the right kind of style long before Covid struck, which, in its way, proved to be a crisis amongst everything else. With everyone locked down at home, the MD took the time to engage in one-to-one video calls with every employee. She was able to tell them what the company was doing in the new and very strange way of working, how clients were being looked after, and to share her day-to-day concerns in a transparent and open way. More importantly, the calls presented employees with the opportunity to voice their concerns. It didn’t matter that those concerns, and therefore the responses, were the same in dozens of calls; taking the time to do it on a personal basis involved employees, and let them know they hadn’t been forgotten; that they were more than just a number.
2. Value employees: A little praise goes a long way. It shows you care. How hard is it to show appreciation for someone’s contribution? The benefit from a small act of affirmation can often be far more significant in terms of the continued dedication from the recipient.
3. Involve people: Times of financial crisis might be the perfect moment to give employees new responsibilities. The chance to step up will engender a feeling that they are taking part in helping the company weather the crisis. And listen to them. They might have ideas to help the organisation through its difficulties.
4. Team effort: Prove that you’re in this together, rather than just say it. Times of financial difficulty call for creative thinking. Take the newspaper company struggling for revenue for its own titles. It was able to generate extra revenue streams by selling its in-house skills to produce other people’s magazines – and the idea was put forward by a respected employee, so his colleagues were able to buy in to an idea that would save their jobs. A crisis was averted for at least a decade.
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5. Train for a new future: Threatened with culling his cattle because the dairy business wasn’t profitable, a farmer steered through the financial crisis by re-training employees to make ice cream. Forty years on the ice cream business is thriving, and in this instance, it was the adoption of new skills and a fostered team spirit that turned a threatened financial crisis into a business opportunity.
6. Prepare the ground: Employers should share as much information as possible. In the Harvard Review of June 2009 Robert Sutton wrote: “If you give people as much information as you can about what will happen (to them as individuals, to their work groups, and to the organisation as a whole) and when it happens, they will prepare to the extent they can and suffer less. Just as important, they can learn to relax in the absence of such a warning”. He wrote of one CEO’s decision to issue a heads-up memo to the staff of his non-profit organisation, laying out in detail the worst-case scenario. While preparing people for a future that might well involve job losses, he also made a firm commitment: No one would be asked to leave for at least three months.
In short, the way to equip your team to withstand a financial crisis is to recognise that they are only human. Be prepared to take them with you into any financial crisis with you, ease their concerns as much as you can, and seek opportunities to have them contribute to weathering the storm.
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The writer has founded ExpenseOnDemand with a vision to enable companies to lead a paperless and a hassle-free business process by offering a smart, simple, & intuitive expense management solution.
Sunil NIGAM ?bolstered the technology base & aced the business model to make solutions affordable to everyone – at $1/user/month, making it the most trusted cloudbased application by SMBs of over 96 countries..and perhaps the best expenses app in the universe!
Find out more on?https://www.expenseondemand.com/expense-management-software ?/?
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Co-Founder | Delivering Easy Automated Expenses Software Solutions to SMEs | Making Employee Expense Management a *Profitable* Experience - yes you heard that right! Profit from Spend Management
2 年Prepare to bring your staff into any financial crisis with you, alleviate their anxieties as much as possible, and look for ways to have them help you cope with difficult situations. Thanks for sharing Sunil NIGAM