Your Employees Switched Gears During a Crisis—Here’s How To Keep Them in the Driver’s Seat

The pandemic has created a sense of urgency for businesses across the globe. It has also given employees the chance to develop processes that help them adapt to complex, unpredictable circumstances.

Over the past year and a half, CEOs across 35 countries tracked leadership lessons. In the process, they uncovered innovative, powerful patterns formed by production-level employees who took pandemic challenges in stride and demonstrated resilience, resourcefulness, dedication, and creativity.?

Now that senior executives are pushing for their employees to return to offices and their operations to get back to pre-pandemic levels, workers want to remain on the front lines and sustain the new ways of working they created.?

As the crisis continues, it’s up to leaders to implement and maintain effective process changes. Here are two lessons on how CEOs can build a new culture that maintains and uplifts the most critical members of their teams.

Lesson 1: Move Beyond Micromanaging?

At the beginning of the pandemic, CEOs started to realize that to run their business better, increase speed, and reinforce trust, they needed managers to get out of the way and give more freedom to their employees with customer-facing roles.?

John Santa Maria, CEO of Coca-Cola Femsa in Mexico, said throughout the COVID-19 crisis, he has learned to empower his employees to deliver with enough creativity on the ground to adapt to rapid changes in local markets.?

Business owners are longing to return to standard operations while maintaining the same type of energy and motivation initially fueled by uncertainty. Many are asking themselves, “How can we continue the competitive strategy we’ve built in the last year and a half?”

Before the pandemic, the answer was developing a hierarchy system where senior leaders tended to micromanage business as usual. This created silos and distanced job functions from the front line. Traditional business hierarchies convey that employees should escape production-level jobs, emphasizing that promising careers move employees away from the customer and closer to the CEO.?

To change this traditional business mindset, some CEOs are reframing their organization around the metaphor of a Formula One team. The leaders who created urgency are the drivers, steering the car instead of the managers. Every lap represents the customer experience, which can be won or lost. Pit crews support the drivers by following well-known, practiced routines and avoiding variance.?

Adapting to a Formula One team’s structures and behaviors requires significant change from senior leaders. It requires them to grant their teams new degrees of freedom and establish new levels of trust. Developing a Formula One team process can be uncomfortable at first, but the benefits are worth the discomfort.?

Lesson 2: Amplify MVP Ideas?

Amid the pandemic, many employees have stepped up their game. Despite working in large companies, business owners’ most valuable players have come up with new solutions and formed small, cross-functional teams to execute ideas. They have deployed flexible ways of working by testing, failing, and adapting.

According to a Bain survey, 75% of CEOs said that while the pandemic hasn’t changed their plans fundamentally, it has required them to accelerate their business strategies. Many organizations have quickly shifted their attention from achieving the perfect solution to executing “good enough” solutions with potential scalability.??

Winning businesses are expected to continue to amplify their MVPs’ “good enough” solutions beyond COVID-19, with an end goal to support and provide the resources to scale those solutions across the company.?

Five Steps To Continuously Celebrate Your MVPs?

To build a company culture that celebrates MVPs, make the following transformations within your organization:

• Help your company MVPs align the “what” and “why” of the company mission while empowering them to figure out the “how” on their own.
• Identify and share lessons learned from your Formula One teams.?
• Establish teams filled with star players to take on your biggest challenges.
• Challenge senior leaders to embrace conflict.

Keeping Our MVPs in the Driver’s Seat?

At Remington Medical, we understand taking a collaborative approach in business, handing off important responsibilities to our team MVPs—we do it every day at our manufacturing facilities.?

Our MVPs build company culture, and we celebrate their successes daily. Throughout the pandemic, we learned lessons in medical device manufacturing we never thought possible, amplified them, and plan on using them in the future. Contact us today to learn more about how we keep our MVPs in the driver’s seat throughout the medical device manufacturing process.