Seasonal transitions, especially during the holidays, stand as testaments to a company’s operational resilience.

When employees clock out for some well-deserved time off, business leaders and their teams are left to navigate the stormy seas of sporadic communications, bottlenecked order fulfillment, and anxious customers left waiting.

Is there a way to sail smoothly through this chaotic season? Absolutely!

But it requires deliberate planning, starting now.

The Cost of Waiting or Doing Nothing

Imagine the downstream effects of having critical updates trapped in an employee’s inbox who is out-of-office, or customer inquiries sitting unanswered. These process inefficiencies can quickly snowball into much bigger issues:

• Delays in processing of orders and getting updates with no timeline for next steps

• Errors in orders as changes are communicated or passed on

• Tarnished reputation and customer satisfaction

• Stressed and disengaged employees who can’t get the information they need or feel they can move their work forward

• No visibility into the business with everyone “waiting” for something

• Loss of momentum into the new year as team members catch up

These are just a few of the results we’ve heard from leaders, but by the time they are feeling the impact, it’s often too late to address. You have time if you act now.

Charting a Smooth Course through the Holiday Season

While tackling bottlenecks and delayed operations might be daunting, we’re here to help. (We can even implement some of these for you - more on that later!)

1. Keep Business Moving through Centralized Collaboration

Nurturing a space where collaboration is uninhibited by physical presence and activity is key. That means ensuring orders and crucial updates aren’t hostages to individual inboxes.

Email and spreadsheets are great tools - but not for collaborating on complex processes. It’s too easy for information to be missed, outdated, not shared with the right people, or stuck in an inbox without visibility.

Establish a centralized place for collaboration where:

• All order information is stored in one place and accessible by all team members

• Each order has its own record where updates can be posted and referenced

• Orders can be sorted and filtered by status and details relevant to each team member

• Orders are searchable to quickly answer questions from customers, partners, or managers

2.  Deploy Automation to Lighten the Load

Don’t let simple tasks hold up your process. Automate where you can to trim down the manual workload and expedite delivery:

• Connect and integrate your tools together to trigger requests or update fields

• Move orders through stages based on details being updated

• Escalate an order to a manager or team if too much time has passed

3: Foster Effective Hand-offs through Standardized Processes

As team members take off different days throughout the season, it’s important that others can keep things moving in the meantime. Ensure a good handoff without slowing things down with meetings and repetitive training calls by:

• Standardizing your process so that it can be done in the same way by others.

• Documenting processes using screenshots or screen recording videos. Alternatively, you can use tools like Whimsical (one of our favs) to map out a process or Scribd to document your process for you.

• Including notes or tips in your templates to give team members reminders if they forget.

• Creating a digital “status” board that anyone can reference

This standardization and documentation can also help during other periods of OOO, leaves (parental, grief, illness), and transition of team members.

4: Create Systems of Visibility to Keep Leadership Informed

As a leader, you can only hear “we’re waiting for X to return” or “it’s on hold until Y gets back” so many times before wanting to pull your hair out. It gets more frustrating when people return, and you find out there were other bottlenecks that could have been solved in the meantime.

Here are a few ways to increase your visibility:

• Define a central place team members can report their roadblocks and progress

• Create a view of at-risk orders based on filters and statuses

• Audit at-risk orders or use AI to analyze orders and identify common bottlenecks

• Setup a dashboard based on your centralized order data and KPIs

5: Build Momentum for a Robust Start to the New Year

Nobody likes starting their year feeling behind and overwhelmed by all the emails and work to catch up on. When you have a centralized, tool that houses all collaboration around your efficient process, you and your team can:

• Prevent the “January scaries” because more got done while they were out

• Have visibility on any outstanding orders and address them with speed

• Quickly read through threads to see the missed updates without trying to figure out which is the most up-to-date email chain

• Have fewer emails to process resulting in saved time

• Start the year motivated and empowered by the clean slate and new, efficient process

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