Staff absence, no matter how long, can hugely affect the operations of a business and Katie Hill talks about ways to mitigate this disruption in the workplace.
As I am about to start my second maternity leave at Fitwise, I am acutely aware how staff absence can disrupt a business. Whether this is a planned absence, like maternity leave, or unplanned absence like sickness, there are a number of ways to ensure that any potential impact on the business and the clients are minimised.
1. Standard procedures
By adopting standard practices and procedures across all business functions, this will ensure that other members of staff are more readily able to pick up any work which hasn’t been completed.
2. Action Logs
Where possible, it is important to adopt action plans / timelines which list all the required actions needed to complete a certain activity, and ensuring that these are kept fully up-to-date. This way of working will ensure that another member of staff can access information at any point and immediately tell what actions have been completed and which are outstanding.
3. Regular Meetings
It is important to couple the use of standard procedures and action logs with regular meetings. This way, all staff working on a particular project are kept fully up-to-date with all developments. If for any reason there was any absence in the team, another member of staff would be able to pick up the outstanding actions.
4. Your Team
One of the benefits of having a large team of experienced personnel is that the team is more readily able to cope with the pressures that come with a change in personnel. Those in small teams need to make sure that they keep lines of communication fully open at all times, that way they can ensure they are all aware of what is going on. Weekly / Dailymeetings can be a good way of finding out what the priorities are for each team member for the week. Additionally, regular one-to-ones with each member of staff can also help.
5. Planning
For planned absence, the recruitment, training and handover process always takes much longer than you initially thought. Start the process early and have a timetable in place for the handover of work.
6. Secure system
It is important to consider the systems that you use. Ideally if everyone is working from the same server system, it means everyone can access documents that others have been working on and can pick up this information in their absence if required. Having a system which is regularly backed up off site is also extremely important to ensure that nothing is lost.
For more ideas and information please contact our friendly marketing team on 01506 811 077 or email marketing@fitwise.co.uk
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