Community News C HOW TO COVER FOR EMPLOYEES WHEN THEY’RE GONE
By Dean Swanson, volunteer Certified SCORE Mentor and former SCORE Chapter Chair, District Director, and Regional Vice President for the North West Region I f the past few years have taught small business owners anything, it’s the unpredictability of life. If your small business weathered the pandemic, you are understandably concerned about shoring things up ahead of the next crisis. My visits with CEOs has revealed that during this time, they struggled most with having to staff the operation when employees are gone for an extended period of time. If you are already in business or just starting your own company, you’ll want to adopt a few tried-and-true practices to guard against the unexpected. Tiffany Delmore, one of our SCORE content partners has written a few practical suggestions that I will share for your consideration. She co-founded SchoolSafe.org, a company helping to develop safer educational environments. You can safeguard your company by sticking with a few simple practices. While the backup procedures presented below are not complicated, they are not automatic. All of them require diligence and follow-through. In the day-to-day hustle of providing products and services, it’s often all too easy to let these backup procedures slide. Given the stakes (and recent events), neglect is unwise. All of the practices listed below are preparatory. None of them will do you much good in an emergency. Instead, they help you keep your small business humming along smoothly as unanticipated events arise. As you implement these, keep asking yourself, “What’s the worst that could happen?” Do this without becoming morbid or panicky.
1. Prepare for the unexpected through cross-team collaboration. No single individual should hold the “keys” to anything you need to keep your small business running smoothly…not even you! In our age of high-tech, cloud-based solutions, there’s been more than one small business to face setbacks because no one thought to get Bob’s login credentials before he took off to a remote location with zero cell service. Similarly, using the example above, at least one other person (preferably two or three) should know the ins and outs of Bob’s daily work routine. True, they may not be as highly skilled as Bob, but they at least hold a comprehensive understanding of how he gets his job done. Be sure to put a plan in place for every key position in your organization. If you have not yet begun a regular, thorough program of cross-team collaboration among your employees, the time is now To read more, visit SCORE’s website at https://bit.ly/3lC7k6d
| Advantage Magazine 26
October 2022
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