PERFORMANCE & PRODUCTIVITY
How To Keep Productivity & Performance High, Especially During A Crisis
How do business leaders ensure that when a crisis hits, team performance doesn’t dip?
A crisis will, by its very nature, often reduce productivity and potentially hamper staff performance, and, depending on the severity, duration and long-lasting effects of it, even scar whole economic sectors for years.
Traditional crisis management rightly focuses on risk mitigation and damage limitation - but to guarantee productivity and team performance remains as high as possible during a shock, investment is key - but not necessarily that type of investment that comes to mind first.
The worst effects of a crisis are significantly diminished when productivity and performance are actively enhanced and invested in. By investment, we don’t necessarily mean monetarily. We also mean culturally and attitudinally.
A crisis will, by its very nature, often reduce productivity and potentially hamper staff performance, and, depending on the severity, duration and long-lasting effects of it, even scar whole economic sectors for years.
For example, with the right sort of agile management teams will over-perform in pressured markets and adapt quickly to new working norms and expectations. When performance metrics are adjusted for crisis-specific outcomes, budgets are more fluid and reactive to emerging threats or problems.
At the heart of crisis response, then, is therefore true company agility. But how does “agility” help teams remain productive, especially when the whole idea of productivity is hampered by the crisis itself?
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When a crisis hits, where should company owners and business leaders dedicate their crisis response first? What sort of priority shifts need to be enacted to guarantee business survival? How does anyone balance a budget when entire industries bottom out?
These are the sorts of questions millions of business owners had to ask themselves 2 years ago amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and they’re the sorts of questions that business leaders focus on how to prepare for the next crisis.
Effective pandemic response
Effective crisis management during the greatest public health disaster in a generation focused, at least at first, on a few key working elements, such as the integration of digital tools to help people work remotely, and the fair and limited use of furlough to meet company monetary commitments.
This foundation provided the seeds for post-crisis growth and, critically, ensured confidence remained as high as possible.
Statistics showed that during the worst of COVID-19 in 2020, crisis management came to the fore as a leading improver of productivity in companies, not just as the bulwark against collapse:
Productivity vs Performance?
Productivity and performance are interlinked. Generally speaking, the principles of good productivity aid the positive performance of a team, and vice versa.
The performance of a team to maintain cash flow and brand awareness during a crisis ensures continued productivity, and productive companies are more invested in, more foundationally secure, and tend to get the pick of the bunch for hiring great staff - hence, improved performance.
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So with this in mind, here are some easy-to-follow guidelines on keeping productivity and performance high during a crisis:
If in doubt, put a crisis plan together
- If you’re amid a crisis and trying to put a crisis management plan together, it’s already too late.
- Crises are inevitable. It is crucial to get a sense of the kind of crises that can impact our institutions and us and develop a purposeful plan as to how we can respond to what may come.
- “We know crises are inevitable at an individual level and organizational level. So it is imperative for all of us to scan the horizon, get a sense of the kind of crises that can impact us and our institutions, and develop a purposeful plan as to how we… respond to the crises of tomorrow.”
- Planning gives you a roadmap for operational agility. It’s as simple as that - you know what to do, how to budget it, and critically your team knows it too.
Create new meaning behind your product or service.
- How are you talking about your company mid- and post-crisis? How did you frame your company’s response, and what do your customers feel?
- Companies that refuse to change in the face of change don’t survive. Indeed, studies show the “meaning-making” period of crisis response - “the efforts to impose a dominant frame on a population” - are the predominant reason why certain opinions about people or enterprises hold during a crisis, and these opinions could be incredibly positive, or incredibly negative. This also happens internally, and your staff feel the same emotions and opinions too.
- So it’s on business leaders to create new meaning, to create new frameworks of business placement and understanding, and to put agility and adaptability at the core of a company's crisis response via their new and improved company value system.
- This will ensure staff advocacy (and raised performance), high brand confidence, and more consistent crisis service (raised productivity).
Reaffirm your brand values
- How do your company values hold up when a crisis hits?
- If business leaders find that their values - the DNA that holds their company together - collapse at the first sign of a struggle, it’s a sign those values don’t hold up, and that every stakeholder doesn’t believe in them.
- Reaffirming company values means stress-testing them against potential crises. How do your values reflect your company's purpose and performance to your customer base, client base or user base? Analyze it, reaffirm it, and make sure everyone knows it.
Equip your people with tools that enable agility
- As learned amidst the pandemic, unexpected circumstances often require nontraditional work arrangements.
- Providing people with tools that enable communication, collaboration, and effective workload management across working styles should stand at the center of any crisis response strategy.
- This will not only ensure the highest productivity & performance in the so-called new normal but will get you ready for anything that may come.
