Running Ops in times of COVID — Advice from 20 CXOs
Noticeboard works with last-mile companies, sales organizations, retail companies, and hospitality companies to improve their field staff performance. The teams we solve for are the teams that are responsible for delivering food, groceries, medicines and other essentials. These are the front line workers on whose back our fragile economy runs.
We are painfully aware of the impact of the current crisis on the 400 million-strong labor pool of India. So we reached out to the best ops leaders to understand the measures they’re undertaking for their field staff.
We spoke with over 20 CXOs and VPs in the country to understand how they are navigating this crisis, and in particular the ongoing lockdown.
What we learnt was that running field ops today is a war-room situation for most businesses. COOs are either dealing with a sharp demand spike and don’t have enough hands to manage the demand, or they’re dealing with a decline and are worried how will they get the labor back to work when things pick up.
The only silver lining in all of this is that the simple (enough) smartphone is a valuable arsenal for COOs today who are leveraging it in innovative ways to manage this crisis.
We found there are broadly 3 things companies are doing today to keep their labor safe and engaged.
A. Over-Communicate Safety Measures:
Keeping your ground staff aware of the dos and don’ts is vital. Your team should know how to safely do their jobs, what are local travel restrictions, the importance of washing hands, and more importantly, they should know that their organization is looking out for them.
The communications being sent out range from personal safety measures to administrative communications like travel restrictions / e-passes availability, to procedural information to maintain business continuity.
Just as important as sending the right information, you need to make sure you’re actively addressing fake information as well.
You don’t want information to reach your team members through unverified channels. Rumors start and spread fast if they’re not arrested immediately.
Make it a full-time job for someone in your team to constantly push updates from the center.
If you don’t have an official digital mechanism, use the broadcast feature of WhatsApp, use Telegram, or if nothing else, send SMSes.
Whatever your medium, you as the COO, as the VP Ops, as the Training Lead, need to be speaking with all your field teams every single day!
B. Invest in Training:
Remember all the training and certifications backlog that somehow never get done because there simply isn’t time. Well, there is time now.
Use your digital training platform to conduct bite-sized training. Short 3-minute-training is an extremely effective learning mechanism.
Send out training content every morning, and send out a quick quiz on the same in the evening. Use the mantra of ‘Train, Re-train, and Evaluate’ to continuously improve outcomes.
Make content engaging. Your classroom training decks won’t work (try going through a 27 slide deck on your phone screen). Create videos. Leverage your marketing teams who might have spare bandwidth.
Or reach out to Noticeboard’s content team. We’re creating a ton of training videos focused on mobile users, we’d be happy to share tips and tricks with you.
And again, if you don’t have a digital training tool yet, use WhatsApp or Telegram, but keep the spirit of training alive.
Oh, and please invest in a digital training platform if you don’t have one already.
One of the reasons companies are spending so much time on pushing out training content is that it builds confidence in the ground staff that they will get the opportunity to get back to their jobs soon.
C. Actively Drive Engagement:
As part of your communication efforts, make sure you’re driving positive engagement.
While your safety advisory has to be top-down, your overall communications needn’t be.
Set up a grievance redressal mechanism where field teams can resolve their queries.
Some of the common questions we’re seeing are on insurance coverage, loss of pay, job security etc.
Top tier companies have taken measures like extending specific insurance packages to deal with the current pandemic, setting up quarantine rooms for staff at risk, tying up with testing labs for their staff. Share the measures your company is taking, big or small.
I guarantee you, your field teams are anyways discussing these questions in their WhatsApp groups and coming to their own conclusions. It’s better if they hear from you, even if it’s not good news.
Set up a photo-sharing group to showcase the positive side of things, let the staff share selfies. Let them have a place to express themselves in the workplace and feel connected.
And going back to the earlier point, training is also one of the most effective engagement tools. Set up leaderboards, recognize top performers and celebrate their learning milestones.
There are unprecedented times for everyone, and we’re all in it together. Your team needs to hear this from you.
When things get back to normal, and they will, you need your field teams to be raring to go. You want them to know what’s expected of them, you want them to hit the ground running, you want them to know their organization was investing in them even when times were tough.
