When the holidays arrive, everyone’s spirits are high. With all the distractions, the online shopping sprees, and personal commitments, your employees’ productivity might get hit hard.
It’s challenging to get your employees to focus on their tasks around the holiday season, and this may result in decreased productivity. In fact, according to a survey of 2700 U.S. workers, 32% of employees find it difficult to balance holiday events and work obligations.
There’s no denying the fact that expecting your employees to work as usual might be difficult, but you can take some measures to ensure that your company’s productivity doesn’t get impacted as much.
You can take steps to ensure that your employees engage and stay productive during and after the holiday season. Let’s look at some effective strategies that can help you achieve just that.
1. Offer Flexible Working Hours
With all the personal responsibilities and family gatherings, your employees would probably find it difficult to work during the usual working hours. Forcing them to work in the stipulated time may lead to a lot of stress and tension, ultimately leading to decreased productivity.
Hence, a good option to consider is to allow flexible working hours during the holiday season. Encourage your employees to plan ahead and decide on the working hours that are comfortable for them.
You must also ensure that your employees communicate their change in timings with their team members beforehand. This will help for easy collaboration.
Tools such as Slack, Trello, and Google Calendar, can ensure that all the work gets done even when the working hours of your employees are not in sync.
2. Keep a Check on the Usage of Holiday Shopping Sites
With holiday sales going on everywhere, we all can easily get tempted to shop all day long. Even during work hours, your employees might resort to mindless scrolling and bulk shopping on online stores.
In fact, surveys show that nearly one-third of employees holiday shop online at work! This can lead to a massive decrease in productivity.
Hence, you should consider taking measures to keep such distractions at bay. You can do this by reminding your employees about the company policies, or blocking such websites during the holiday season.
3. Spruce up your Company’s Social Media Pages
During the holiday season, everyone is on their toes, full-fledgedly promoting their businesses. You should also stay in the game by keeping up the holiday spirits using your social media channels.
You can do this by posting pictures of your internal events and fun holiday activities. This will increase your brand awareness and build a good connection with your prospects.
Also, post lots of content relevant to the time of the year. Focus on creating more fun, visual content such as videos, animations, infographics, etc. You can use tools such as infographics maker and video animation maker to save time while ensuring high-quality content.
You can also conduct fun, holiday-themed social media contests and giveaways. This will keep up your social media engagement, and your employees will also get to have a good time.
4. Be More Empathetic
Empathy is a very important trait to have during the holiday season. Everyone has family commitments and priorities. So, instead of imposing strict rules and restrictions on your employees, try to be more empathetic.
Instead of judging people, assure your employees that they can get work done while adhering to their family commitments. Reassure your employees that you value them by offering good bonuses and perks.
This way, your employees will not just put in productive work during the holiday season, but they will return back all charged up even after the holiday season ends.
5. Take up Community Initiatives
Community initiatives such as working with non-profits or doing community service together can not only contribute to the greater good but will also keep your employees’ spirits high.
Such initiatives will give your employees some bonding time while working on something good. This way, your employees will look forward to the coming year, develop a sense of belonging, and will be more engaged in the company’s activities.
6. Accommodate Remote Working
Just like flexible working hours, you should also consider enabling remote working for your employees. After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone has realized that having a completely remote work environment is not that difficult.
So, offer remote working options to your employees. Ensure that you empower your team with the right project management, communication, and collaboration tools so that they can work remotely with the least amount of friction.
7. Plan Way Ahead
Planning and scheduling things ahead of time is the best way to ensure that your employees keep up the productive work even amongst the holiday season distractions.
Hence, schedule meetings a month or a couple of months ahead of the holidays. Decide on the leave schedules, the changes in working hours, and remote work plans of all your employees.
Plan all your individual and team activities beforehand so that everyone is prepared for work. This will enable employees to adjust their schedules according to the plan and everyone can rest assured that things will get done on time.
Final Thoughts
To summarize, we can say that restricting your employees and putting too much workload on them around the holiday season is not going to do much for your company’s productivity. Instead, it might result in lowered employee satisfaction and employee retention rates.
So, be more empathetic and encourage your employees to have fun while getting productive work done. Most importantly, plan ahead so that everyone can stay at peace knowing that they can enjoy the holidays while not compromising on work productivity.