More Transparency, More Productivity

The world’s second-largest brewer group decided to cut their staffing costs in its head and regional offices by about a fifth in the first quarter of 2021, The Financial Times reported. The Dutch Group decided to do so as the horrendous impacts of the coronavirus pandemic continue to beat the company’s profit growth. 

It is worse from the tourism business. The largest theme park in the world has been reported to lay its 28,000 employees off as pandemic keeps hammering their business. According to CNN, the company’s profit has been blown off by 91% by the first three months of 2020 so that the decision was made to produce a more effective operation once the condition is back to normal. 

Randstad Risesmart writes that employees’ productivity is easily affected by external factors, from stress levels and sleepless nights to the economic and political climate. In this case, the news of layoffs from all over the world surely affects employees’ productivity. News such as business disruption and profit dropping down generates anxiety and discomfort for employees.

There are five things to consider regarding how to support employees’ productivity in unfavorable times like nowadays. The first thing is transparency is the key. When employees are being left out of the conversation, they have the tendency to create their own reality which can lead to distraction. Consequently, calmness, which is related to productivity, will be hard to maintain. 

Secondly, a resiliency a manager should always perform. Related with the first thing, managers who are transparent and honest will earn the trust of their employees. Managers should prepare themselves to listen to their employees and offer support. They should be able to come up with tangible action plans since from what we have learned, uncertainties lead to depressions.

As mentioned before, tangible action plans are what needed to maintain productivity, the third thing is about thoughtful innovation. When a layoff happens, particular positions are eliminated yet the workload becomes higher. Team leaders need to modify the work process, redistribute the remaining workload, then set a short-term goal. All of them need to be tracked efficiently and effectively.

The fourth thing is about proactively communicating the action plans and goals. As remote working is being mostly implemented, keeping a clear communication line is very challenging. Managers need to keep in mind that the goal should always be clear to employees while at the same time, they have to listen and show their interest to their employees.

The last thing to do is to benchmark the progress out. Randstad Risesmart presumed that three months are the perfect time to monitor all the predetermined plans and goals. Companies can follow up the whole department through meetings. During the meeting, every department and/or every individual can discuss how the contributions each of them has given. 

To help the emerging issue, Qlue comes with a solution called QlueWork. QlueWork is a comprehensive mobile workforce management application. Seeing from the previous paragraph, QlueWork might support some of the things to do for maintaining employees’ productivity. 

QlueWork’s features, like task management, can maintain the openness and transparency of how a team works. Moreover, by leveraging this feature, team members can track the progress of the team or even the company’s goals. In other words, there is no room for employees to make up their own reality when served a tangible task. Uncertainties only bring negative outcomes, remember?

References:

• https://www.ft.com/content/7aea5539-14f5-4fd9-a50d-491359fccee4
• https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/29/media/disney-parks-layoffs/index.html
• https://www.randstadrisesmart.com/blog/5-ways-keep-employees-focused-during-after-layoff