How your business can take strategic steps to survive the holiday season and not fall into a chaotic mess.
In December, many businesses feel a lot of stress because of the pressure to finish projects and end the year on a high note. In addition, team members are often distracted by everything happening during the holiday season, including holiday shopping and gatherings.
Also, businesses deal with many team members taking time off, feeling burned out, overwhelmed with project due dates, and trying to accomplish everything before the year ends. Therefore, productivity decreases. What can a business do to prevent falling behind and having a stressful and chaotic season?
These are six strategies that a business can use to minimize disorder and increase productivity during the holiday season.
1. Check If Any Of Your Team Members Are Going Through Work Burnout
Work burnout can affect an entire business. Whether it’s one team member or many, work burnout has a domino effect. See if anyone within your team shows signs of burnout, such as a lack of energy, slow performance, conflict with colleagues, and no patience.
The holidays can heighten feelings of work burnout. As a business owner, having a conversation about work burnout with your team members can provide a way of dealing with the issue before it gets out of control.
Some key points to have in a conversation about work burnout are:
- Ask if your team member feels challenged enough – Often, burnout can be caused by boredom or simply not feeling challenged enough in their work.
- Suggest everyone on your team take mini breaks – Having mini breaks throughout the day can help give the brain a rest for a little while. Also, doing simple activities such as walking around the office or outside, having a coffee/tea break, or a short workout can be recharging.
- Provide a mentorship program – People enjoy sharing their knowledge with others. Setting up a mentorship program between experienced and inexperienced team members can build a better team and allow someone to feel they are making a difference in someone else’s career. In addition, it can increase employment engagement.
- Prioritize workload to avoid feeling overwhelmed – A business workload can be heavy during the holidays. To prevent your team from feeling overwhelmed, have a team meeting to emphasize prioritizing their workload from urgent to critical to unimportant.
2. Give Team Members At Least A Day Off During The Holidays
During the holidays, many workers are constantly on a go-go-go mindset. Meanwhile, other workers are distracted by thoughts of everything they need to do during the holiday season. Either way, a business should give employees at least one day off during the holidays.
Productivity drops for a business when team members are exhausted, overwhelmed, and unmotivated. Giving your team members a day to relax, take care of themselves and their families, and do errands is a way to help them avoid feeling swamped during the holidays.
A business that offers workers personal days places itself on a winning track because workers can unwind and recharge their batteries, therefore improving productivity. It is a crucial strategy in avoiding work burnout and feeling run down, which can lead to illness.
Be specific to your team members about how they can take advantage of taking a paid personal day. Explain the procedures for asking for a personal day, such as contacting their supervisor, composing an email, and giving coworkers a heads-up.
It’s essential to have a standard operation procedure for team members’ personal days to avoid unnecessary confusion.
3. Extend Project Due Dates
Completing projects by the end of the year is fundamental. However, projects during the holiday season can become a mess. As mentioned in this blog post, a business deals with a lot of disarray during the holidays.
According to Allex, a survey says that 42% of all project project managers experience December as the most stressful and chaotic month.
A project manager on your team shouldn’t feel the weight of burden on their shoulders. Extending project due dates during the holiday season can help take the pressure off of everyone and the opportunity to take the time to complete the project in a well-organized manner.
Rushing to finish a project will only lead to more problems and can go on into the new year and become a crisis that your business needs to deal with. Needless to say, it’s not the best way to start off the new year for any business.
A key factor when extending project due dates is to let clients and team members know beforehand. Constant communication is essential with everyone involved in the project, including clients, team members, vendors, and suppliers.
Many clients can be understanding during the holiday season. However, some clients need more persuading and understanding. Some essential steps are:
- Discuss the importance of the project’s deadline
- Share the progress that is happening so far
- Set a new reasonable deadline
- Show appreciation for extending the project’s deadline
- Provide proof of your team’s dedication to completing the project
4. Have Realistic Business Goals For The End Of The Year
In December, many business owners try to start pushing the pedal to meet their business goals. You may have business goals you still want to accomplish by the end of the year. Business and industry trends can determine how a business grows.
If your business goals have not met your expectations by the end of the year, it’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to rush into accomplishing everything by December 31.
Realistic business goals can put your business on the right path. List your business objectives from the beginning of this past year. Then, review your list and survey what your business accomplished this year.
Prioritize your business goals from important to moving in the right direction. If you have business goals of brand visibility, such as SEO, website ranking, and increasing traffic flow to your website that aren’t meeting your expectations, develop a plan to help you achieve your goals into the new year.
It takes time to build a business. You won’t be able to achieve everything in 4 weeks.
Overall, December is a pivotal time to set short-term goals rather than overwhelming your business and team members by rushing huge goals that can be a slow burn.
5. Have Enough Team Members On Hand
Engaging team members during the holidays can be challenging. During the holidays, businesses experience many workers who take multiple days off throughout the holiday season, leave on 1-2 weeks of vacation time, or simply get sick due to the cold and flu season.
Having enough team members to do the work is essential. Therefore, a business doesn’t feel they are falling behind, and the pressure is not high on other team members throughout the business.
A good strategy is giving team members a rotating schedule. In addition, team members can share workloads and responsibilities to offset work overload.
Hiring temporary employees during the holidays is another great way to help with workloads. Also, teaming up workers with veteran team members for training can help build a stronger team. The best practice for this strategy is to hire temporary employees before the holiday season begins, such as mid-October.
6. Automate The Workload During The Holidays
If you are a business owner who wants to avoid feeling bewildered during the holidays, automated systems can help save you time. Automated operations are beneficial because they provide higher productivity, reduced operating costs, better performance, and customer satisfaction.
According to Forbes, using automation to perform repetitive tasks can be a huge time saver. Automating repetitious work tasks such as:
- Email management
- Writing and scheduling social media posts
- Managing tasks
- Payroll
- Invoicing
- Email marketing
- Data entry for a CRM
If automation is a new concept for your business, choose a service or software that is easy to understand and use. Some well-known automated platforms are Clickup, Trello, Pipefy, and Asana. When deciding on an automation service or software, the best way to see the benefits is by looking at your business’s processes and needs, such as areas where your business is falling behind, constant error, or any shortcomings that may be happening.
Conclusion
To conclude, a business doesn’t have to be in chaos during the holidays. These six strategies can help ease the pressure and stress the holiday season can bring.
A business that focuses on the needs and well-being of its team members will successfully be on track to reaching its goals into the new year.
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