Get your Company Moving in the Right Direction

In this time of Global Emergency, we need to look for ways to improve and get the most out of our business and our people. It is quite easy to lose sight of what is important to sustaining a healthy business in this situation. We must balance the mindset and quality of the workplace while keeping our businesses successful. Two main topics need to be discussed in a company to run smoothly through a crisis: workplace environment and communication.

First, with COVID in mind, we need to focus on our communication. Communication is an easy topic to bring up as needing improvement and an entirely different issue to find a way to make it prosper. The optimal way to communicate is to put a system of short meetings in place to move information up and down in companies. Each level meets with their supervisors to pass on potentially viable ideas for five minutes per day. This will lead to innovation and problem solving that will aid your company long after this pandemic with the right teammates. These brief meetings will lead to much greater value than a few short meetings per day in the long run. The most important part of this is for all employee’s ingenuity to be given a viable chance for improvement. Without a team giving all their insights, employees lose their greatest asset to the company, their minds. Our suggestion is to use either a paper transfer or a safe cloud-based tracker. The tracker will allow companies to prioritize what to work on and what is not viable at this time. Always bring SMART goals to your project for them to be successful. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-driven. Once all these categories are used to prioritize ideas, all employee improvements will make leaps and bounds for the company.

Second, we need to understand the necessities of the workplace and be able to keep employees safe. With the new safety suggestions, the question becomes, how do we continue to run while following safety recommendations. With six-foot social distancing, we need to look at our floor layout to prepare the best arrangement of people to keep them safe. If possible, look for a way to spread the work environment and then work with your team to move materials with as little physical contact as possible. This will reduce the particulate in the air and the amount your employees touch the same objects. We need to identify what is needed for PPE and how frequently it needs to be changed out or cleaned. For the most part, employees should have a mask at this point. It is important to determine how often and if your type of mask can be sterilized. The next PPE that needs to be considered are gloves. With gloves, they need to be changed and sterilized frequently to be effective. How frequent depends on how clean your products need to be and any attributes that may put your workers at risk.

Between safety for your employees and a way to truly hone your entire companies’ ingenuity, you will excel in a time of need. Remember that the leadership team needs to be on board and push it forward for all of this to work. There needs to be no ideas shot down immediately to allow more reluctant people to be willing to share their creativity. And this is true throughout all levels of the company. Once one level starts to reject ideas before giving a new thought time to be understood, it will slowly end the drive to succeed for all. Safety and creativity are the keys to success in uncharted waters. Live with a desire to drive both in your company, relinquish fear, and it will lead you to success.