How to Support Your Team During A Crisis - Part 2
Hey Team,
A shout out to the medical mask making brigades up and down the I-5 corridor. A professor friend of ours is filling bins of ‘em for donation along the Medical Row corridor of MLK. One of our landlords is organizing mask making and donating with his tenants. A stage manager friend has rallied her out-of-work costumer colleagues to make a donate more than 1,500 in just a few weeks!
Yes to the PPE!
Whether in food service, warehouse work, or the medical profession, we all need to be hyper-focused on our Team’s safety...not just the masks and gloves, but extra attention to make sure the adapted working environments are safe for social distancing and repetitive movements as well. We’ve seen registers moved to dining tables in doorways, new walk-up service windows quickly inserted where a month ago a wall stood, and Door Dashers disappearing into the caverns of Apartment hallways. We are all making shift under the new circumstances, but let’s not forget that these quick changes are still affecting the health and safety of our Team members in the field. As we’ve been trouble-shooting our own adaptations, here is the fruit of our brainstorming:
Safety, Safety, Safety
Are newly situated tables and registers at an appropriate height for signing receipts and taking orders?
Have you relocated the anti-fatigue or anti-slip mats to accommodate your Team’s newly defined traffic patterns?
Safety equipment such as masks and gloves are still needed for back-stock employees not interacting directly with customers -- they are still interacting with one another.
Train delivery staff on the ring-and-wait method. Encourage customers who are able to greet deliveries at their reception doors, not requiring your staff to enter buildings unnecessarily.
Relocate your First Aid kits, phones, and extinguishers for more accessible usage within your modified working environment.
Is your team, including your Management, still getting full breaks and lunches? Encourage swapping out fresh PPE at the beginning of each return to shift, if able.
Conduct wellness check-ins daily. Are your Managers checking in on the daily health of your staff prior to shift, to assure they are physically fit and prepared for the day? Are you checking in on your Managers?
Stay connected with your Team. Text, group message, or calls... they may be the ones on the battlefield, but they need to know their generals see the work they’re doing and have a plan.
Next, let's remember the employees at work right now are your front-line warriors. They are putting their health on the line daily for your company’s welfare. Most of them would so much rather be safely at home with their families, but someone needs to put food on the table. Some mega businesses have added $2/hour extra wage for workers on the front lines at this time. None of us are Amazon or Walmart nor have their financial resources, but we do have other options we can offer our Team members, based on the services we render:
Free shift meals, or a family meal to take home end-of-shift.
Extra day off with pay - An opportunity once a week or two to stay home with their loved ones, without the stress of lost wages. For those of you who received a PPP loan, this can be a way to use the money in a fashion that fulfills the forgiveness guidelines while taking care of your Team.
Change formerly tipped positions to the rate of their tip-less counterparts — less in-house customers mean less tips -- the depended-upon financial staple of many Team members’ monthly income.
Bank PTO for the future - Can’t offer extra resources now? How about once you are up and running at full tilt again? Consider elevating the accrued PTO time for each hour your Team works through this crisis. Get it in writing. Get it in their hands. Your Team may be grateful to have a job, but you better be grateful to have a Team.
….And finally -- Conflict Negotiation.
At this time our nerves are more exposed, our stresses are intensified, and communication via text and email are not always as emotionally clear as they could be. Make it a point to call and talk out issues, devising resolutions together like the great Team Leaders you are. These are extraordinary times, necessitating extraordinary patience and empathy -- but then, you have an extraordinary Team. So we can and will get through the rubble of this, to the other side.
Intact. (And with tact.)
And healthy.
Together.