As if the labor shortage weren’t already aggravated by the so-called Great Resignation and the droves of baby-boomers retiring, you can add a giant spike of employees calling out sick recently. Fueled by the Omicron surge and likely combined with other seasonal maladies, many businesses are struggling to field enough employees to cover their shifts. What can anyone do in the face of this problem, especially if they’re already short-staffed?
Silo
Maintaining a functional workforce may come down to isolating your staff into separate groups, or silos. This may be a logistical nightmare, but if you’re able to separate your people into morning and afternoon, weekday and weekend, or even halves of weeks, then you can help to mitigate officewide sickness. This applies to locations as well: if your business operates multiple stores, do what you can to avoid floating employees between them. This can be a tough call when you have surplus labor at one location and a deficit at another, but a traveling employee can unknowingly turn a problem at one place into a disaster for everyone.
Prioritize
Many businesses have peak hours or days for when they generate the most profit. For example, a sit-down restaurant might do best at dinnertime, while a fast-food restaurant does best during lunch. The same often applies to retail, where many have their highest sales in the evenings or on weekends, when their clientele has free time. This will be different from industry to industry, and even business to business, and you know your business best. If your employee availability becomes dire, whether from officewide illness or other complications, you may need to start maneuvering employees to the critical times of day when you’re most successful, and shut down the other shifts. Closing during these other windows can be painful, but when you have no choice, you have no choice.
Outsource
Outsourcing is often considered a bad word, especially as it relates to manufacturing jobs. But when we’re talking about outsourcing for your business at a local level, we’re not talking about calling an assembly line in another country: we’re talking about finding help from other small businesses in your area. Consider what you need: are there tasks that you and your employees do that might be done by an outside company? For example, many restaurants don’t launder tablecloths and napkins themselves. Instead, they hire a commercial laundry company to handle this task for them. Are there components of your business that you might be able to farm out so that you can keep your employees focused on what they do best?
Endure
Tactical scheduling, partial closures, and hiring outside companies may all sound unideal. But we all have to find ways to tread water when faced with extreme circumstances, which means we might have to make decisions that we wouldn’t even consider in better times. But these are tough times, and so we must endure. Survive now so you can thrive later.
Regardless of what strategies you employ for your business’s survival, you should always seek to deliver the best customer experience possible. To that end, The Brandt Group is here for you. We offer world-class mystery shopping, the kind that delivers actionable feedback so you can adjust course when necessary or double-down when the time is right. Additionally, we offer leadership training, which is a great opportunity to invest in your employees to ensure their job effectiveness remains high and their satisfaction strong. Want to learn more? Drop us a line, and let’s start talking strategies today!
