People straggled back into the workplace today, a day after Mother Nature dumped some 20 inches of snow on Chicagoland, tossing a huge monkey wrench into well-laid plans, providing a day of leisure for some and generally upsetting what might normally be a mundane winter workweek.
And what are they talking about? Where they were when the heavy swirling winds hit. How they got home. What they did on their surprise day off. And how they got back to the office.
Everyone’s got a story. Everyone wants to tell. And when you think about it, such conversations encourage office camaraderie (something some managers wish they could buy).
But how can you manage the conversations to move from each employee’s retelling of their “Blizzard 2011” experience to the job at hand? Consider supporting a forum for discussion — then moving on.
“You have to recognize that some of that is going to happen. And it’s going to happen again Monday because we’ve got a Super Bowl coming up,” says G. Logan Jordan, associate dean for administration at Purdue University’s Krannert Graduate School of Management. “These kinds of events happen all the time and people want to have their community, but you’ve got to get them re-engaged whether it’s elections or holidays.”
“There are some similarities between this and disaster recovery in firms because people are always kind of talking through what happened and you’re trying to get them re-engaged in what needs to happen next,” adds Jordan, who suggests:
1. Put the focus on a collective effort rather than individual. “Try to get people thinking about how all these things impact clients and customers and get them thinking about the problems they’ve [customers and clients] got. ‘We’ve been delayed so they’ve been delayed so how can we get them caught back up’. Because we’re just spreading pain if don’t get re-engaged and get the supply chain going and things of that nature.”
2. Focus on the customer/client. “It’s important to not talk about the business’ bottom line,” says Jordan. “Instead, we’re talking about how us getting things done are going help others, help them get over the impact of the storm.”
3. Focus on working through the problem. “Make working those problems part of kind of celebrating the event,” he says, so the conversation becomes about what we’re going to do solve the problem and the business going again. Employee’s “stories can then begin to be about how we helped the firm recover from the storm and not the fact I couldn’t get plowed out, and did you see the street and things of that natures. Make the stories more about the success instead of recounting what had happened.”
“These things will happen when people are together and they’ve got time on their hands,” Jordan adds, “so keep the agendas tight and the time together more focused and kind of in a hurry sometimes. ‘We’re behind we need to catch up’.”
Otherwise? “Because when they’re in their office, they’ll be online looking at the pictures and stuff. And when they’re together, they’ll talk about the pictures they saw. So just kind of got to get people moving again and engaged in a positive way.”
At San Francisco State University, such situations are generally first handled with a message from the university president to staff and faculty that “discusses the matter, acknowledges the institutional impact and the personal impact of the disaster,” says Michael Martin, executive director of safety and risk management and HR operations at the West Coast school. (Depending on the severity of the disaster, psychological services are made available, he notes).
In general, “we’ve established open forums for all employees on the campus and encourage the departments to create the opportunity to huddle within the department,” he said, “to create a formal venue for people to share all together.”
And “because we’ve created those other opportunities for people to talk,” added Martin, “we’ve never had to deal with the issue of people not returning back to work.”
