What to do with staff during the seasonal downturn?

Reduced employee activity in the days between holidays is not an objective necessity. Staff idleness during the low seasons should be attributed to management's shortcomings. Rarely do bosses spend precious minutes and hours studying social media and blogs. And in vain! They have employees who openly discuss what to do when there is nothing to do at work during the holidays.

Employees of various companies share tips, people tell funny stories that suggest they are doing anything but working. Their ideas on entertainment are very diverse: socializing on social networks, listening to music or audiobooks, playing cards and computer strategies online. This mass of advice, of course, does not include a single recommendation on how to get on with the job.

And all kinds of pleasures and pleasant rest at the workplace before the holidays are paid for by the employer!

It turns out that the entire staff has to pay the boss for the missed holidays and for some periods in between. But organizational psychology has long since discovered a remarkable fact: the down season is a great opportunity to solve many problems effectively and fruitfully. It is an ideal time to develop and refine strategic and global plans for the company.

Intolerable idleness and its consequences

The situation with forced downtime of the entire workforce is common in almost all industries and business niches. The holiday season is a dead season for many companies in the consulting, finance, and IT sectors. The banking sector also faces this phenomenon.

On the contrary, trading firms consider the pre-holiday period to be highly active and prosperous. But immediately after significant dates, they are in a downtime, because people's money is spent. During such periods, employees do not always understand the purpose of being at the workplace, but they carefully make sure that salaries are paid for such days.

It is typical for the working mood to drop after the holidays. For some time afterwards, the atmosphere is far from enthusiastic. The situation is compounded by the fact that many key decision makers are on vacation during the winter holidays. Projects and turning points are postponed until they return.

Low labor productivity while wages remain stagnant is not the only problem. There are two psychological mechanisms at work that reduce productivity for a long period after the low season ends.

The results of these mechanisms can take a long time to be felt.

1. Double demotivation. If employees are aware of the fact that they can get money without doing anything, this goes against all motivational programs and the part of the corporate culture that is responsible for the attitude to work duties. This prevents you from getting involved in active work after the holiday season. Changing activities, on the contrary, helps to quickly get into the rhythm. That is, it is better to send employees home to spend the holidays with their families than to leave them idle in the office. After the holidays, it takes one or two working days to get back to work. And if the holidays were spent in a relaxed mode at the workplace, it takes 3-5 days to return to work as if the employees were on vacation.

2. Conflict situations. If there is no workload, employees are more likely to find out about each other. Not all forms of such interaction are constructive, and the number of conflicts is growing. Some of them are provoked by simple boredom. After the end of the low season, it is difficult to resume work at the right level, as the atmosphere in the team deteriorates and interpersonal interaction is disrupted.

Experts in business psychology believe that such difficulties should not arise in a company. After all, it is possible to turn the low season into a fruitful time that will be no less useful for business than a surge in market activity. This requires a system of thoughtful, competent management.
A great manager is someone who has a lot of current tasks and little free time. The growth and development of each employee of the firm is a daily job that implies the ability to delegate tasks, set priorities and optimize processes.
If the workload of specific tasks decreases, this is not a reason to rest and do nothing, but an opportunity to deal with strategic issues.

How to solve this problem

It is important to create a work plan to manage employee time during periods of slow activity. This document will be different for different markets. But it will contain common tasks that are part of the routine of all businesses. Usually, there is not enough time for them in the flow of daily affairs, but they significantly affect the overall vector of development and the company's prospects in the market.

Action plan for the low season

The off-season is an ideal period for a number of activities. It is a time that is convenient for innovation. After all, innovations turn out to be a waste of money because employees in a number of cases do not have time to learn new things and delve into the nuances. The low season is perfect for testing improved reporting systems and technological solutions. You can test all your ideas and study suggestions for improving them and adapting them to the needs of your staff and customers. There is time to correct the steps to implement innovations.

From a psychological point of view, activating programs to introduce innovations in times of business downturns has a good effect on the company's atmosphere. Employee morale rises, and the sense of vulnerability that arises from a decline in sales disappears.

Constructive ideas for business improvement at such a time are an additional motivation to improve the quality of work. And the background of perception of innovations becomes more positive and favorable. After all, at times of sales growth, employees think that everything is fine, that they don't need any improvements.

Another option for creating an off-season plan affects the work of HR services. Their initiatives during high seasons are poorly perceived, and employees think that they are being interfered with because they are too busy with their direct responsibilities. Against this background, the tasks of HR employees seem secondary to everyone.

Active work of the HR department in large corporations is a guarantee of professional and career growth of employees. Therefore, time should be allocated to this activity in the periods before the holidays.

It is best to plan testing, personnel evaluation and certification, trainings and seminars for the downturn. The attitude of employees will be more favorable to them than it might be during a period of high activity.

Creating teams for brainstorming in a moment of relaxation between the holidays is another option for activity. There are things that can be optimized or improved in the work of departments and the company as a whole. There is not always time for these processes, but the issue of modernization should not be overlooked. Such projects make sense only if the ideas collected are used for decision-making and put into practice. If you have no ideas about what processes should be discussed in a brainstorming session, you can take universal tasks. These include improving reporting. In times of recession, you can collect information from employees about what they are not satisfied with and how you can improve the system of reporting on their activities.

Planning and summarizing the results

Stephen Covey, the author of the bestselling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, calls this type of activity "sharpening the saw." Especially at the end of the year or quarter, it is useful to summarize the results, analyze financial results, organizational and managerial achievements. Planning should not only concern processes within the company, it is important to take into account the needs of customers. With the help of special internal reporting forms, employees can plan personal and joint tasks, and set goals for the next quarter within groups and departments.

Studying the activities of competitors and creating a plan to seize the initiative from them is a useful activity at any time. But in the off-season, employees have more free time for this. They can thoroughly study the peculiarities of the activity of successful companies in their market segment. And it is important to do this outside the office. The absence of current tasks at the workplace gives you a chance to leave the office and visit competitors' stores or service points. The study of statistics by region, by behavioral subgroups, by product categories will allow you to formulate plans even more adequately and put them into practice at the time of market activation.

Training is a great way to occupy the days before the holidays. Moreover, classroom training does not work well at such a time, and in the field, employees can, for example, study the goods they work with in more depth in order to give customers more complete and detailed advice in the future. Sellers should not read out information about product properties from packages or tags. But at the moment of sales activation, they have no time to study the characteristics, so the quality of product presentation is falling. It can be improved in the off-season by conducting a product knowledge test.

And such stages in the company's life are also good for changing the display of clothes on mannequins in the window, for re-designing shelves. This work is best done when there are almost no customers in the room, not when there are lines of them at the cash desk. At the same time, you can think about related products to improve the return on the upselling system.

Features of implementing changes during low sales seasons

All of these measures are useless if management does not adhere to three important principles.

• First. An off-season workload plan should be created in advance. It should not be made at the last minute when employees are already suffering from idleness. It should contain a clear schedule of events and be presented to the staff in advance. You can't bet that employees will use the sales downturn for personal learning and self-development. This is unrealistic! Most employees are not intrinsically motivated to complete current tasks. In the periods before the holidays, this mood drops even more. That's why it's important to familiarize them with the plan in advance, to catch the moment when they are not yet fully relaxed.

• Second. It is important to control all the activities and projects conceived in the plan and assess the quality of their implementation.

• Third. The result of activities during the recession should be changes for the better. It is important to take into account the wishes of employees and announce the results, make the necessary decisions. Employees should understand that this work was not done in vain, that they were not wasting their time.