Geared Up Issue 4 2017 | Page 48

How to Manage Crises While Maintaining Workplace Productivity A 46 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