4 Ways to Deal with Business Stress During the Holiday Season
4 Ways to Deal with Business Stress During the Holiday Season
Help your employees take the edge off this holiday season.
For retailers and third party logistics companies, the fourth quarter is all about making big sales to sustain them throughout the rest of the year. While workplaces must be productive during this time to process increased demand, the end of the year is also filled with holidays and their social and cultural demands. If not managed properly the stress of the holiday season can take the joy out of the season.
Throughout the years, I’ve found that there are ways to satisfy the two opposing requirements of meeting business challenges and maintaining a social and family life.
Plan The Work
Stress is caused by novelty and unpredictability. To combat these uncertainties, carefully planning busy times helps everyone retain a sense of control over what seems like an overwhelming spike in business volume.
Work with your partners and vendors throughout the year to ensure that you’re receiving up-to-date and accurate forecasts so that you can plan to support the increases in volume that will no doubt be coming your way. Receiving updated forecasts is helpful no matter the time of year.
But getting holiday forecasts as early as possible during the year is particularly important if you’re planning to hire additional workers to support the increased demand. Having the people and systems in place to provide training, reporting, and other operational support is also critical. If you can see your business operations you can manage your business operations.
Adjust The Plan
While planning and reporting is critical to retaining that sense of control over your business operations, no plan is ever followed to the letter. There will always be adjustments and necessary changes.
At our morning meeting, the warehouse floor adjusts to the actual volume and actual labor so that work can be assigned. A meeting at the midpoint of the day evaluates the work completed so far and any changes are discussed and made. Has order volume increased over the forecast? Do workers need to be reassigned to other programs? These adjustments can be easily made within a system that has built in flexibility.
