If you feel like you are limping to the finish line of 2020, you are not alone. COVID-19 burnout is a real issue with 40 percent of employees reporting that they feel exhausted or burnt out by work because of the pandemic. From uncertain layoffs and closures to irregular hours and store policies, this year has been a lot to handle for everyone.
However, this doesn’t mean you need to give up during the holiday season. You can mitigate stress levels for your team and push your company to hit its key targets before everyone breaks for the Christmas holidays and New Year’s eve. Follow these five tips to make the most of the last month of 2020.
1. Delegate More Effectively
If you’re facing burnout this year, take a step back and know that you don’t have to do everything. You can delegate to your team members and make them smarter and more skilled within your organization.
Delegating doesn’t mean offloading work you don’t want to do. It means training your employees to take on new, more advanced responsibilities. This means there is a right and a wrong way to delegate. A few key delegation tips include:
- Provide clear parameters for the ideal outcome of the project.
- Make sure your team members have the necessary time and resources to succeed.
- Establish periodic check-ins to make sure they are handling the new responsibilities well.
- Let them run with it.
By delegating now, you can take a few key tasks off of your plate in 2021 while empowering your employees to grow more autonomous and effective in the new year.
2. Be More Efficient With Emails
Are you attached to your email app throughout the day? Do you keep your email account on a second screen so you can catch important messages when they come in? This might not be the most productive way to manage your digital correspondence. In Strategies to Improve Your Email Productivity, communication experts encourage professionals to check their email just three times during the day. They explain:
“Check your email once during the first part of the day, again around lunchtime, and once more before checking out at the end of the day. Add it to your daily calendar and stick to the schedule.”
You can also develop a workflow to evaluate emails so you sort through them faster. For example, filter or archive emails that don’t require action on your part so they are removed from your inbox. You can also ask to be removed from irrelevant email threads so you can focus on keeping up with the most important messages without having to sift through the ones that aren’t critical for you to read.
3. Prioritize Cleaning Without All the Extra Work
Your customers and employees expect you to take cleaning seriously as pandemic cases surge this winter. Now may be an ideal time to hire a professional cleaning company to sanitize work stations and keep common areas clean. In fact, one office cleaning survey found 83 percent of businesses are investing more in cleaning because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even if you only hire a team to clean your workspaces once each week, you can reduce pandemic-related stress by giving your team a safe place to work. Plus, you and your team can focus on running the business rather than keeping up with cleaning.
4. Conduct a Meeting Purge
Did you know the average worker attends 62 meetings per month and considers half of the time spent in meetings as a waste? In fact, 91 percent of workers have daydreamed during meetings and 39 percent slept during that time period.
If you want to be more productive this holiday season, meet less, and work more. Evaluate the meetings you have scheduled each week to see which ones you really need to attend. Which ones can you cancel entirely? Which ones are out of your scope of work?
Even if you cancel a few meetings each week, you can free up enough hours to increase your productivity this month.
5. Set a Few Key Goals for the End of the Year
Evaluate the remaining days of the year and determine what you can accomplish based on your existing workload. Identify a few key projects that you want to complete, or at least send off to clients, and tasks that you don’t want to bring into 2021. By focusing on these key goals, you can better relax during your holidays off and start the year off fresh.
“Tracking how you are going in relation to your goals can help you know when you need to adjust how much energy you are putting in, or if you need to try a different strategy,” says Michelle McQuaid, a workplace wellness expert. She continues: “Take time to regularly review your progress, and seek out others that you trust who can give you honest and supportive feedback.”
Get More Done This Holiday Season
If you’re eager to put 2020 behind you, take this month to prepare for 2021. Finish on a strong note and set your company up for success so when you return, you’re ready to hit the ground running with a new year ahead of us.
Author Bio: Jessica Thiefels is the founder and CEO of Jessica Thiefels Consulting, an organic content marketing agency for mid-size B2B businesses outsourcing content marketing. She has been writing for more than 10 years and featured in top publications including Forbes and Entrepreneur. She also contributes to Glassdoor, Fast Company, Score.org, and more. Follow her on Twitter @JThiefels and connect on LinkedIn.