As a business leader, it is tempting and inevitable that in moments of crisis you focus on your financial viability. But what about your broader role as a leader and keeping your most precious asset – your staff – engaged?
Excalibur is a SME who supply Telecom and IT services for fellow SME’s. I would caveat this article with we are one of the lucky ones to have a business that is still open and pretty busy.
We have always focused on driving the magic combination of staff engagement and customer satisfaction. We believe a total focus on your staff – we call them Partners – leads to customer satisfaction and therefore business growth. This focus has been our north star during the crisis.
Here are 6 simple things we have been doing (no apologies for how absurdly simple they are) –
- Daily team calls mandatory at 0900. Each team has an informal call every day to outline the formal and as importantly informal stuff happening (Box set choices, lunchtime menu)
- Company-wide updates weekly – via video call. Live update over MS Teams with comments coming over chat. We tell the staff what we know and what we don’t. Honesty is always appreciated.
- More reward and recognition – Now you cannot walk the floor, find new ways to recognise staff. Keep finding good things to appreciate.
- Business as Usual – keep some of the rituals going. We still hold most planned internal meetings to maintain structure and check business KPI’s.
- Furlough – we furloughed about a third of our staff on full pay. However, I called and explained it to them personally. We also still keep in touch with them socially so they don’t feel left out.
- Have a drink together – we end the week with a ‘bring a drink’ video call. Most of the content is not printable but a lighthearted way to mark the end of another tough week.
Simple – yes and certainly not rocket science but it has helped us so far. Communication is everything even if there are lots of unknowns.
Peter Boucher, CEO
