Five tips for handling COVID-19 from our company

1. Create an emergency team

...consisting of the Management, HR and IT, should meet up online every day to discuss the latest updates about the company, and if necessary, resolve the issues, monitor the current situation, take appropriate measures towards protecting the employees and decrease the negative impact of the company’s financial resources.

Once a week, the meeting should talk about the bigger picture, where the current situation is discussed in detail, the current measures  are evaluated. Moreover, the main areas, which should be communicated regularly for all the employees,  are discussed.

Areas to be discussed by  each team :

• Operating model of the company in the current situation
  • Identify who can work remotely from home and who is crucial at the office
  • Guide managers and lead personnel on how to effectively control the teams online
  • Coordinate with the suppliers and consider possible restrictions for the deliveries
  • Think of alternative suppliers
• Decisions made for adopting the measures via instructions for
  • employees whose presence at the office is crucial
  • employees working remotely from home
  • suppliers and clients
• Communication strategy of the company

• Minimizing the economic impacts
  • Should be reassessed depending on the sector and the volume of impact on the company:
    • Sales outages e.g. What can happen? How to prevent those? What are possibilities of virtual business development?
    • Possibilities of reducing variable costs
    • Consider a potential bank loan to cover up the coming months
  • Honest discussion with the employees, whose potential cannot be fully used by the company explanation of the situation and agree on a voluntary leave

2. Communicate openly and proactively

Send clear and structured messages to your employees, so that they know how the company acts towards the current situation. Some of the employees might think that the company is not doing enough, and they do not have clear instructions about how to behave in certain situations. Create regular message distribution  with the instructions to the employees. Think of some alternative apps such as WhatsApp to quickly communicate and discuss a certain issue or possible queries  with the employees.

3. What to include in the communication with employees?

The specific communication will always depend on the type of business. Below, we outline some recommendations on what to include:

• How the company evaluates the current situation and  which main measures the company is or will be implementing  
• Possible impact on the company and how we are trying to prevent them. You can possibly  connect it with the recommendation of the voluntary leave after an agreement with  supervisor.
• Thank employees for coping with the current situation and the fact that the company values their approach and does everything it can to protect their safety – health as a priority
• Who and when works remotely from home and for whom it is necessary to come to work; from whom the employees will receive detailed instructions
• Measures the company needs to take for the employees who must come to work + recommendations for the employees, who are on home office
• Information about the further communication – regular daily/weekly updates and performance reviews
• Questions about the most common life situations:
  • Delivery of sick leave documentation,
  • Leave to care for a family member documentation
  • Mail distribution and other information
  • Where to get protection equipment

4. Effective use of collaborative software

A lot of companies use the Office365, therefore, the below mentioned hints might be useful for you. Microsoft Teams – offers the option to have “everything” at one spot – documents, team chats, planning, notes etc.

Examples of how to use this program for leading the team:

• Create Teams community for your department and grant access to all your colleagues
• Posts/Chat - this is a part of the main window  where employees can operatively exchange information potentially useful  for the whole team such as questions, news etc.
• Files – a space  for clear document exchange and work, unless you already use another solution that meets your needs
• Add OneNote – you can add OneNote into teams for easier brainstorming. Create meeting minutes, exchange longer news and updates – all is stored at one place, without browsing through emails.
• Add MS Planner – you can add Planner as an additional tab into Teams, where you can create individual tasks to be performed. Add an employee or more, who will work on a certain task. You can also add deadline to fulfill the tasks and steps that needs to be taken. This is the space, where you can see which tasks are being done or still needs to be done. Besides, employees can also write additional comments on job status updates without using phones calls or emails. We also advise to filter the tasks based on the type of work or employee, who will fulfill the task and time by which the task will have been completed.

5. Managing the virtual team

Online team brings new challenges for both management and employees. It is more demanding to maintain motivation and a sufficient level of communication among the employees, compared to the work in a workplace. For effective team management, we recommend:

• Using types of software mentioned above
• Using Skype/Teams as a tool for meetings and screen sharing
• Regular max. 15 minutes long stand up meetings of the team (short updates, task delegation, goals for the day
• Short update with every employee at least once a week a -  discuss the current situation, potential problems, obstacles and work load
• Sending ad hoc messages through Skype/Teams and operative virtual phone calls to solve the issue faster
• Think of the activities and tasks, which you might have normally ignored e.g. online trainings, working on a new services or product, cleaning your address layout, updating older templates and other documents and methodologies, process documentation  and software solution