Jewish Link contributor Naphtali Hoff has come out with a free eBook, entitled “An E.P.I.C. Solution to Understaffing: 4 Action Items That Will Help Your Team Overdeliver.” Below he shares his thoughts about helping understaffed businesses go from underperforming to “over-delivering.”
A painfully familiar reality for today’s nonprofit and business leaders is understaffing. My clients complain about it all the time:
“I don’t have enough people on staff to get our work done.”
“If I had better people who could be more efficient with their time, I wouldn’t always feel so pressured and stressed.”
“The quality of our work would improve dramatically if we weren’t so short-staffed and short-skilled.”
This is, in fact, the reality that so many business leaders are forced to endure.
They come to work each day in dreadful anticipation, worried that the second they walk through the door they will be inundated with desperate calls for help. They get these strained, “Are you kidding me?” looks every time they ask something new from their people. They’re bombarded with complaints—from supervisors, shareholders and/or customers—about shoddy performance and reduced product quality.
And they wish that they could simply throw money at the problem, by hiring more people or, better yet, bringing in more talent to their team. But for most of the leaders with whom I work, that’s just a pipe dream.
Does this describe you?
You’ve probably suspected that this problem is not something that you alone struggle with. And you are 100 percent correct. In fact, throughout the world and in every industry, today’s leaders feel mounting pressure to achieve more with less.
No longer can they simply bring on staff as needed to get the job done. Higher-ups have told them that there is no room in the budget and they’ll have to find another way.
So, leaders do what they can. They work longer hours and ask the same of their people, even when they know how much it’s resented. They neglect their health and well-being and try to get by using any means possible.
They give their people tasks that they’re not properly trained to do because there’s no one else to do them. And they know that what they’re doing is unsustainable, but they can’t see a way out.
The results are predictable. Product and service quality diminishes. Clients move their business elsewhere. Fewer new leads are generated. Stress levels increase. Morale plummets. Workers start calling in sick. Some quit or threaten to do so. Leaders burn out if they aren’t phased out, all the while thinking that their manpower shortage has doomed them to their inglorious fate.
And the downward cycle continues, with no apparent end in sight.
Fortunately, all is not lost. It is possible for leaders to drastically increase team productivity while alleviating anxiety and stress. How? By simply following a few high-impact strategies. That is the way to not only meet expectations but exceed them.
You can go from “understaffed and underperforming” to “understaffed yet over-delivered.” You can exceed all reasonable expectations: your boss’s, your team’s and even your own.
To learn more about our E.P.I.C. solution and to download this free eBook, please visit ImpactfulCoaching.com/EPIC.
By JLNJ Staff
