How Can Your Business React To An Urgent Situation?
It’s the shock and surprise of the errors of major flaws in business that take even the most talented by surprise. Emergency situations barring life and death, are quite something to behold for the first time.
This can be something like a major deal being put in jeopardy and the senior management of a company having to quickly rectify a problem that has upset the other side.
You could be in serious talks with a client potentially partnering or going on a joint venture, and suddenly you get some bad press because of one employee or event concerning your business. How can you react to that? What do you even do when you have other emergencies such as financial or logistical?
This is probably why business advisors get paid so much even though they’re not necessarily hired by the company. Their knowledge and know-how when it comes to reacting quickly to wildfire mishaps concerns are amazing. So how best to plan for such an occasion?
Having all hands on deck
What’s the best tool you have at your disposal when you’re trying to react quickly to something that drastically has happened to your business? Communication of course. But it’s not just the act, it’s how you do it too.
If you’re a small business owner you have potentially over 100 employees. If you’re a medium-sized business you have many more hundreds and when you’re a large business you have thousands.
So how can you keep all the most important employees in contact with each other? Using personal mobiles is out of the question. You never know they might be out of battery at any given time because they’re for personal use. A business phone or rather a phone specifically for business is the way to go.
Employees will only be using their business phones for communication regarding work. Calls and texts and that are just the basics. With MDM software for Windows and macOS, they can use their phones to access their work as they would sit in the office.
Any tasks they were working on that need to be changed suddenly, they can do so using their mobiles. It’s also great for making some swift changes to documents such as contracts, reports, and statistics. There are apps available to mass-communicate urgent information to your team to help mitigate such scenarios; one that’s being utilized by many companies currently is DialMyCalls.
By provisioning the employees with smartphones for this role, your business has its own communication style and access.
Being on call
There are certain positions in a business that pays a lot. The senior roles of any business will always carry this prestige of having higher salaries.
However, this means they also come with greater responsibility. In this day and age, where a business is 24 hours a day, where trades, deals, and growth is occurring everywhere around the world and at all times.
Your senior employees should be on call. This is another good reason why having business phones can really help you stay in touch with the most important members of a decision-making circle in your business.
Being on call basically means that some employees can be contacted at any time of the day or night. Even when they are sleeping, if the situation is very serious they can be woken up and made to come into the office as quickly as they can.
These situations should be incredibly rare anyway so it won’t really be asking too much of them. Besides, they are in positions whereby they partake in making growth or decline types of decisions.
Ask the people who you think you will need and trust to take on these responsibilities by being available to get to work at any time they are asked to. It could mean you have a greater chance of surviving or dodging a grave mistake in the middle of the night.
Staying when it counts
Sometimes urgent situations make unannounced visits to businesses. They just seem to come out of nowhere. This could be anything from a machine or tool breaking in your manufacturing plant and not having a replacement on hand.
It could be something like a product failing the final test and evaluation phase even though it passed every other test before it. Suddenly you are presented with a flaw that could risk the entire project from being halted or in some cases, even canceled. So what do you do in these kinds of tense situations? You have every team member stay a little longer each day until the problem has been solved.
You don’t want to ask employees to stay behind after hours because it can really hurt their morale. It can also edge them closer and closer to burnout. However, this is to be done when staying behind counts for something.
Improving or saving a product so it can reach it’s a deadline or perhaps fixing an error in a report that’s due in a couple of days, these are the perfect times you as the boss can demand your employees stay and work late. Sometimes the best way to react to an urgent matter is to just rely on overwhelming manpower.
Just make time
Okay if all else fails and you simply cannot meet a deadline, it’s just out of the question, then you can but do one thing. You have to be straight and honest with all those involved. If you’re working on a joint venture plan with another business then you need to contact them right away.
Not in the morning if it’s the afternoon, not the afternoon when it’s morning; right when the realization has dawned on you. This way you allow the other businesses or internal teams to quickly react and accommodate the changes that are about to occur.
You lessen the surprise and increase the chance of rolling with the punches by doing this. It might hurt to admit you have failed to meet a deadline but react in such a way that the damage is limited.
Every business owner must think long and hard about how he or she can react to very urgent situations. Having reliable yet personal communication in the way of mobile devices strictly for business use is a fantastic way to cope with these moments of crisis.
What can you do to react to an urgent business situation?
