Just a very quick tip today about short-term solutions becoming long-term issues. Obviously, most organisations are at the moment looking at short-term measures to deal with what hopefully is a relatively short-term issue – getting people back from the pandemic, etc.
One of the things that does tend to happen in organisations when you’re hit with a crisis is that you have to change your processes, change your policies, and change your procedures to deal with the short-term issue. But what a lot of companies don’t do is explain how they’re going to review those measures, how long those changed measures are in for – and then actually revert back to your normal processes. As a result, the short-term fixes become long-term custom and practice. Therefore you build bureaucracy into your organisation. You build less productivity into your processes – and it becomes an issue for the organisation.
Often people, when they review these many years down the line, don’t know why they do things in such a complex way. It’s difficult to then go back to your your normal processes. I would really recommend, as you’re looking at these short-term processes, to actually talk about how long is that going to be for? When are we going to review it? Have documented that you will revert back to the normal process when a certain trigger point happens, etc
and constantly review and discuss these with your Employee Representatives or Trade Union Representatives, etc so that everybody’s clear.
As you hopefully go back to whatever normality will be going forward,
you don’t build processes and bureaucracy into your organisation that you’ll regret later, as it would mean that you’re going to build cost, etc into the organisation.
I hope that helps and if you need any more information about workplace mediation give us a call.
Other Useful Videos in this Series:
Avoiding Disputes Tip #1 – Employment Lawyers
Avoiding Disputes Tip #2 – Furlough
Avoiding Disputes Tip #3 – Use Technology
Avoiding Disputes Tip #4 – Over-stretching employees
Avoiding disputes tip #5 – 20% salary doesn’t mean 20% work!
Avoiding disputes Tip #7 – your actions today could be scrutinised by HMRC over the next 5 years.
Avoiding disputes quick tip #8 – if there’s any possibility of redundancies start planning now.