If you are like most business owners, you have laid off employees in the last couple of months. These are some of your worst moments as a business owner. The extreme situation that we have found ourselves in caused you to make decisions that were not easy, but they were necessary.
As you have begun to re-open, you may have found yourself with a new problem. Some of your employees may be eager to return to work, but you may not want them back on your team for one reason or another. Others may not be interested in coming because they are making more money on unemployment. You may also have some that would rather return as part-timers or even work from home.
The decisions you make right now will be the key to protecting your business. If you bring the wrong people back, before long you will find yourself looking to shed those employees again. If you hire everyone back, you may end up overstaffed due to a slow return to your pre-COVID revenue numbers.
What if you could use this time of rehiring as a reset and an opportunity to build the ideal team? How would your business thrive if you had the best people in the right seats? Would your business have the right foundation to grow as the marketplace recovers? Could you come out of this crisis as a more effective team that is positioned for growth?
Here are four simple steps to rehiring your ideal team:
- Determine how many new hires you will make in the next 90 days
Do not fall into the trap that everything is back to normal. Be slow to hire. Follow your new process and hire your ideal team. - Stop thinking of your old employees as your current employees
You have been given a bit of a free pass on your terminated employees. You get a re-do, so make sure you are bringing on the right team this time, just because they worked for you when this started does not mean they need to work for you now. - Write out the characteristics of your ideal team player
Don’t hold back on details. Describe what they look like, act like, think like, believe, say. Think of the best team members you have right now. What makes them great? What are their key characteristics? Write it down and then look for those qualities in the folks you are interviewing. - Create a written Work from Home (WFH) Policy
As the marketplace recovers, you need to be ready to face the growth in people working from home. If you have employees demanding to work from home and you have no policy to respond with, you have no control and could find yourself scrambling. Be proactive and create a WFH Policy.
For you, these steps may look like too much to do. You might be thinking that it will be easier to just hire your old employees back and get things back to the way they were. Your future self will thank you if you take the time to execute on the 4 Step Plan listed above.
Take 30 minutes to walk through Step 1, while consulting your financials so that you do not put yourself in a situation where you have too many employees for the work on hand.
Shift your mindset in Step 2 so that you can mentally shift into reset mode. Look at this as an opportunity to have a culture reboot.
Take 30-45 minutes on Step 3 so that you have clarity in your mind of who you are looking for when you begin interviewing. Do not compromise. The time you invest here will pay you back in multiples.
Spend 30 minutes in Step 4 thinking of what it would be like to work from home with your company and put together a quick framework that can be your starting point for a Work From Home policy. We have had so many clients who have had their productivity ratchet up during this quarantine period, and every single one of them had a plan and a policy to establish WFH standards within their organization.
Business will return in Oklahoma, and we will come back stronger. Take some time to work on your business instead of in it. Plan for a people upgrade and get after it in the 2nd half.
