In today’s tip, we’ll explore possible blunders that may occur when faced with an electrical power outage. Lack of electricity can potentially place you hours behind in productivity and heavily decreases a company-wide effort to complete goals and tasks as a unit. The power is out and the damage is done, how do you mitigate the situation?
A well-known culprit and foil to success is downtime. In order to keep operations moving forward, crucial parts of your infrastructure can put you at a huge loss if you’re solely dependent upon one dimension of your business. Internet and cloud managing is a major function of your storefront and it has the power to leave you crippled if you don’t have accessibility to critical files and databases. In this worst case scenario, productivity has ceased, what’s your next step? Don’t start out by sending the entire office home for the day. Contact the proper resource providers in your area to figure out the duration of time they estimate the power will be out.
Hold a Staff Meeting to update the situation and stay on task with all of your employees. You don’t need technology to hold a meeting so talk about important initiatives, team building efforts, or any issues that need to be addressed. Ever have to push back or cancel a meeting due to an unforeseen phone call? There’s a silver lining to every scenario.
Organize and Clean Your Office, if your team needs an excuse to stay in the office to meet financial obligations, put them to work. While everyone is waiting around for power to be restored, they can tidy up their own personal workspace and other common areas in the office. According to RTKEnvironmental treat your office space like your homestead, don’t neglect dirty air ducts, refrigerators, and office equipment, these are some of the leading causes of worker illness. The cleanliness of your office will reflect on your company as whole.
Catch Up on Employee Evaluations and Team Building by utilizing spare time to check in with your staff and critically evaluate their recent performance. Let them know how they’re doing and what could be improved upon. One-on-one meetings can address concerns or be used to admire accomplishments, so when the lights come back on your team can pick up where they left off with increased morale.
All Else Fails, Send Your Team Home. Downtime isn’t easy to overcome, and sometimes the only option that you have is to send your team home for the day. Even if this doesn’t feel like an option, and you have important work that needs to get done, there’s always the option of letting them work remotely, should they be equipped with the technology to do so (a bonus of cloud workspaces). Either way, the more time that your team wastes sitting around waiting for the outage to be resolved, the more time and revenue that’s wasted.
While making the best of downtime might be your only option, at Vision Computer Solutions, we consider downtime to be an emergency. If your network or a critical part of your IT infrastructure goes down, leaving your employees high and dry, our technicians go into emergency mode. If your business wants to learn more about how to prevent downtime, give us a call at 248-349-6115.
