Tip of the Week: Stay Positive When Disaster Strikes

In uncertain times, one of the most important things for any business to do is to stay the course—albeit in an adjusted fashion. To help, we’ve put together a few key practices to work positively to achieve this end.

Involve Your Team

In a crisis event, you need to have your team at your side (even if they must physically stay home) and supporting you. Here are a few ways to encourage this:

• Keep your team in the loop. Make sure that everyone has the information that they should, as withholding as much as possible will only distract from the goals you are trying to accomplish and make effective communications more difficult. Of course, don’t share information that they shouldn’t hear.
• Set the tone. As much as you can, maintain control of the situation at hand and make sure everything that you need to complete is still completed. Your employees will probably follow your example, making progress and recovery much simpler.
• Trust who you’ve hired. There is a reason that you haven’t fired your employees: they can contribute to the business. Allow them to make these contributions, rather than taking on too much yourself.

Evaluate the Situation and Adjust

Of course, a disaster is going to require some deviation from your standard operating procedures. Considering this, you need to be prepared to do a few things:

• Take stock of your situation. Try to get a comprehensive understanding of how things have been impacted by the disaster, and what is likely to happen as a result. Once you do this, you will be more prepared to shift your strategy as need be.
• Make the hard calls ahead of time. As you are anticipating the future, figure out what you will need to do to potentially deal with your predicted scenario. Start with the smaller stuff, like how your business hours might be influenced, and move on to the major ones, like how long of a shutdown your business could survive.
• Adjust to continue operations. Use the technologies available today to figure out alternative methods of completing your usual workflows. Give remote work a try, or open an online store to sell merchandise.

Keep Your Chin Up

Finally, it is important that you and your team maintain a healthy frame of mind as you make these adjustments, never mind deal with a disaster’s other ramifications.

• Find some normal. Keep yourself grounded and thinking clearly by finding something that helps you disconnect from the influence of a disaster. This can be something as simple as a new hobby, fostering an animal in need, anything that keeps you occupied and engaged.
• Help. If you have any free time, spend it doing something that can help someone else, even if it’s just writing a card. Even the smallest gesture can make a big difference.
• Stay informed via reliable sources. With the low barrier for entry that today’s technology provides, it is too easy to find and share incorrect and inflammatory information out there, not to mention opportunistic scams. Make sure you only trust news sources with a lengthy and proven history of reliability… even if it doesn’t make you feel better, at least you’ll know the information is trustworthy.

A big part of what k_Street Consulting, LLC does as a managed service provider is to help make sure that our clients are able to use the tools we give them to make it through scenarios like this. Call (202) 640-2737 today to learn more about how we can help, and make sure you are staying safe.