We might want to think that the changes caused by the pandemic are temporary, but they are far more likely to be permanent, especially when it comes to the workplace.
For large-scale organizations as well as small, local businesses, managing rosters and time allocation can be trickier now that the pandemic is in the mix.
With local regulations and restrictions still active for most countries, your scheduling system and employee managing strategies need to be restructured in order to stay on top of your schedule and avoid being understaffed.
To do so safely and without compromising the productivity of your business, you need a variety of solutions at your disposal. From tech and digital tools, all the way to improved employee communication and enabling remote work whenever possible, you need to rethink the way you approach time management.
Here, we’ll offer a few of the most effective solutions that can be extremely helpful during these uncertain times for organizations of all shapes and sizes.
Focus on wellbeing as well as productivity
Even if your local regulations aren’t strictly enforced, you need to think about your teams’ wellbeing when you’re planning for shifts or allocating work.
Add to that, you also need to think about each employees’ wellbeing and happiness, especially due to the crisis. Here are some things you can do to help:
- Enable flexible work hours whenever possible to help employees work more efficiently and focus on their wellbeing, too.
- Take time to craft schedules that avoid traffic congestion and peak hours for public transport, to decrease the risk of contracting the virus for your employees and reduce contact with other people.
- Introduce added cleaning stations across the office. So even if your staff is using biometric-scanning tools, they can clean the surface and their hands immediately.
- Avoid sharing tools and items at the workplace, and encourage social distancing, wearing masks and other preventative measures prescribed by the government. Respecting those rules helps with more than limiting the spread of the virus, it also helps with your employees’ peace of mind.
- Introduce video conferencing whenever possible to replace face-to-face meetings. Keep those video calls short and to the point, which will help boost productivity and leave more time for direct employee correspondence to address their individual needs.
Use software to reduce contact
Digital tools have long ago become instrumental in enabling organizations to grow seamlessly, not to mention collaborate more easily via the cloud and project management tools.
In times of great strife such as the pandemic, even using software to track time & attendance can make time management easier and help you boost productivity and transparency.
Such software is especially useful during the pandemic, when your staff is at greater risk of getting sick and requesting time off. It can quickly become difficult to track who’s available for work and manually creating an employee schedule with limited staff can be quite a challenge.
The built-in features such as alerts and notifications as well as comprehensive visibility will help your organization set up shifts without overlapping or similar errors so common with handwritten rosters.
Ultimately, software usage helps reduce physical contact, as all schedules can be done digitally and remotely.
Enable remote collaboration
One trend that has been getting more and more popular during the past few years, and has earned even more traction since the pandemic kicked in is remote work. As a matter of fact, this trend seems to be here to stay for long after the pandemic as well.
It’s extremely helpful during this crisis, as it allows companies to send their workers home, as not everyone needs to be present at the office to complete their duties successfully.
If your organizational structure allows for remote collaboration, make sure to work it into your schedules, and to always notify your employees when someone is available, albeit remotely. From customer support workers, to accountants and legal advisors, many workers can easily transition to remote work.
Allocate work with equality in mind
This crisis has pushed many companies to work additional shifts to make up for fewer workers in their regular hours, or to accommodate the increase in demand for eCommerce stores. Whatever your particular situation might be, you need to make sure that none of your workers are on the brink of burnout, while others are idle and feel like their skills are not valued.
In times like these, when such issues can easily arise out of sheer panic and disorganization, it’s up to you as their leader to make sure equality remains the key driving force of work allocation. Use software to track work progress, task completion, and work allocation, and create comprehensive reports to help employees be more productive without pushing more work their way.
Introduce extra cleaning times
For most workspaces, the layout hasn’t been designed to accommodate the needs of social distancing during a health crisis of these proportions. Especially if you work in large-scale offices or you have entire warehouses and manufacturing as well as storage facilities, your workers are constantly interacting with the same tools, equipment, as well as one another. Even if you work in a smaller office and only have a handful office workers, hygiene needs to be taken up a notch or two.
For that to happen without disrupting your employees’ work and their active hours, you should include additional cleaning times into your schedule. Whether you have cleaning staff among your own workers, or you’re working with external cleaning experts, make sure that you create a cleaning schedule to increase the safety of your offices.
Safety and health should be at the center of your organizational processes, which includes how you tackle time management, rostering, and scheduling for your teams. While you can eliminate distractions and help your teams stay on their tasks, you should also make room for improving overall efficiency through better time and task allocation, smarter shift assignments, and a stronger focus on office cleanliness. Use the listed ideas to help your staff adjust and to retain your organizational effectiveness over the long term.