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Refocusing on success in a crisis

Now is the perfect time to rethink how you manage your company. Without your team working effectively and logically, your business will struggle in the best of times. Now, it's more important than ever to refocus, work cohesively, and make changes for the better.

Managing teams effectively, creating realistic plans and redirecting energy into essential projects could help you tackle a crisis and make it out the other side with integrity intact.

Streamline as much as possible.

Most if not all of your plans will have been disrupted in recent months, so it’s time to take the energy you had committed to certain projects and shift it to others.

Rather than trying to finish plans in a reduced or different way, it might be worth reexamining if they still make sense at all. Cutting all current plans, writing down the current state of the business, and then taking a new approach may help you identify strengths and areas in which you can still grow.

A key factor is reducing costs: with ShopFactory, you can manage many elements of running an eCommerce store single handedly, such as orders, payments and shipping. But there may be other areas in your business which could benefit from a streamlined approach.

Anything non-essential may need to be put on the backburner for the time being.

Make transparency a priority.

With so many changes happening at once within businesses, from plans to timelines to the economic situation itself, keeping your team informed is vital. A lack of information may result in disengaged and disenfranchised employees who struggle to focus or take new directions.

Being communicative and inviting collaboration and feedback for difficult decisions will help build trust and a feeling of security.

For many, crisis management has become a key talking point for job interviews, with candidates asking how businesses respond when situations become unsteady.

If you used to have a top down approach, it may be worth flattening your structure: both customers and employees are needed to keep a business running, and a crisis can build team spirit, or deflate it entirely.

Pause growth and expansion.

Unfortunately, some businesses have needed to let staff go. This can be a strategic decision to ensure that as many people as possible can stay employed longer term, and can be necessary in difficult times.

But depending on your business, simply pausing growth plans and maintaining the status quo might be all that’s needed. Rather than hiring a new member to manage a project, it might be worth hitting pause and focusing on your existing staff and what’s needed to weather this storm.

Employees who have an understanding of your business and vision and who have already been trained could prove invaluable long term.

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By focusing on clear, communicative leadership, reexamining which projects are necessary, and pausing the expansion of your business you can set yourself up for longer term success. While it can be difficult to find silver linings when things aren’t going to plan, changing those plans accordingly can help drive you, remotivate you, and keep you focused.

- Lena Klein

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