How to Manage Crises
While Maintaining
Workplace Productivity
A
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s much as we try to structure our work time, there’s
no scheduling the unexpected. Emergencies and other
crises overwhelm us all occasionally; unfortunately, no
one has ever invented a predictive model (or crystal ball
for that matter) that can actually warn us about everything that
might blindside us during the average business day.
In a perfect world, we would expect the unexpected, since
we all know from experience how quickly things can go south.
But somehow, it rarely turns out that way. Ever the optimists,
most of us look forward to the workday proceeding smoothly and
according to plan, so we can keep to our schedules and maximize
our productivity. And sure, optimism has its good points, but
sometimes, we let a positive, can-do attitude blind us to the reality
that things can and do, in fact, go wrong.
Advance planning can mitigate some disruptions. But that
assumes you can plan for those disruptions … and we human
beings share a perverse talent for inventing new problems for
ourselves and others. When something comes completely out of left
field, you have no choice but to fall back on good, old-fashioned
flexibility: You deal with the disruptions as they appear, doing
whatever you can to alleviate their effects without utterly derailing
your personal productivity.
If you’re lucky, you can hand the problem off to someone
else who can solve it more easily and efficiently than you can. In
other cases, it’s best to take a direct hand
yourself, stepping in and mitigating the
damage, so similar disruptions can’t happen
again. Whatever the case, the real test of a
work process isn’t how well it works when
everything’s going smoothly, but how well
it performs when you’re slammed with
unscheduled events. So in this article, we’ll
by Laura Stack
look at ways to mitigate such events in
ways that allow you to keep your workplace
productivity on an even keel, without killing yourself with
overwork.
Pre-Crisis Planning
Even when all seems well, you sometimes have to stop for a
moment and take a good look around. A broad view will give you a
better chance of seeing things as they come over the horizon. After
all, forewarned is forearmed, as the old saying goes. True produc-
tivity requires more than just focus, drive and determination; as
I’ve emphasized many times, it also means putting systems and
processes in place to monitor your workflow and safeguard it when
things go awry.
If necessary, establish guidelines to direct your responses to