Take a breath: make a change

Here’s the second installment in the Take a Breath series, in which we explore ways to transform the current work challenges into positive strategic improvement.

This week, think of challenging times as a special opportunity to make strategic changes. It turns out that during tough times, individuals are much more receptive to doing things differently because they see, immediately and obviously, that the status quo cannot hold. This is a great time to make a change that may have been challenging under normal circumstances. For instance:

• Hold a daily standup meeting. Hard to do when people trickle into the office willy-nilly, but now super-important to make sure everyone is aligned. (Make it very short!)
• Get serious about knowledge management. When information is readily available by visiting the SME two desks down, writing stuff down seems more work than it’s worth. Now it’s really clear that a good knowledge base helps.
• Hold collaboration huddles. With everyone more isolated, ad-hoc collaborative thinking and troubleshooting is out. Virtual huddles work well, and team members will appreciate having a measure of social interaction.
• Rethink specialization. Many support organizations are over-specialized and most would do well to move towards T-shape individuals (who have a good grasp of an entire product or line of products, and one or several specializations). You may have had to make adjustments to ensure good coverage based on individuals’ schedule constraints. Use them to push in the direction of less specialization. This is also true of customer success teams.

What changes have you been meaning to make that Please share your own suggestions in the comments. And stay healthy!