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Diary Of A Consultant Mom
Diary of a consultant mom

How MOMS Can Still Ace It, Even When the world was Hit by a pandemic!

After the hit of COVID-19 the world’s balance just shifted, people woke up one day to find themselves quarantined, working from home, schooling their kids.

Uncertainty looming with a new pandemic that hit the world as a curved ball out of the corner.

As a working mom, the amount of responsibility that doubled, or even tripled is overwhelming, and I am sure that all moms out there are facing the very same dilemma.

Suddenly I woke up one day to find that schools and nurseries got suspended, my older kid needs to attend his online classes, while I must wrestle the younger one from not barging in on him.

And the cherry on top, no more house help is provided as we are all afraid from the impact of mingling with outsiders. I have to do my work while my 3-year old gets to socialize with my boss and colleagues.

Work is no longer a quiet time for me to focus on what’s at hand and what is needed to be done, but how to juggle focusing on writing reports and MOMs while listening to baby shark or PJ masks in the background.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a serious threat to people, businesses, and economies across the world. Gartner’s recent Business Continuity Survey shows that only 12 percent of organizations are highly prepared for the impact of coronavirus. Smart leaders have to focus on how they can best protect their people, serve their customers and stabilize business continuity.

During times of crisis, business operations—the intelligence engine of an organization—are more important than ever. Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are being tested by rapidly evolving challenges, such as travel restrictions, and remote working becomes a reality.

Working from home is not an easy task for a mom, but with good organizational skills -that all moms naturally have- it can be done, and we can excel in it.

Most employees are afraid of this hit on their livelihood and scared that companies and organizations might let them go to cut cost.

As an organizational consultant, my goal is to help organizations restructure the current internal layout of the company to become more productive and efficient in the new virtual setup. I may also work with new business ventures that want to design and establish a corporate working structure to support the goals of the company. The idea behind organizational consulting is to make the best use of all resources available by organizing them in the most logical and advantageous structure.

So here is my take on what we all can do:

First and foremost, BREATHE! This pandemic will teach us a number of things, the most important of which is how to be more organized. The new setup requires us to not worry about what we cannot control and only focus on what we can control. We can control how we work under pressure and still be able to excel, achieve our goals, and fulfill our tasks.

How to focus on work on a personal level?

  • Focus on what you can control, a small area at home to work from, drop all negative thoughts about the situation and focus on the good side, how long has it been since you last enjoyed your work while not racing to beat traffic?
  • Make sure you are mentally ready to work. Get up, dress up, and show up at your work corner.
  • Make sure you are well informed about the task at hand.
  • When having an online call try to wake up early before its time, to be able to mentally focus on your call.
  • Drop the things you cannot control out of your mind, like the thoughts of when this will be over, I am bored, I am exhausted, etc.….
  • Try to manage your schedule; no work after 5 pm, so you can have a firm line between work and personal life.

On a managerial and leadership level you have to:

Act now: Organizations must respond rapidly and robustly to maintain business continuity.

PREVENT: What to do now?

As a business owner you have to ensure the wellbeing and safety of your employees, take immediate steps, organize and prioritize your actions to put your employees first, search and use the options and capabilities offered by global business services:

  • Enable remote working interface, to assist your employees’ communication with each other.
  • Ensure that your workplace is a safe work environment through sanitization protocols.
  • Based on the work needs, divide your employees into groups to minimize the numbers, limit the number of meetings replace it with online meetings instead.
  • Set a safe protocol for all services area (canteen, elevators, corridors, restrooms) that are commonly used.
  • Cancel or limit any unnecessary business travels, client visits.
  • And do not forget to use the local department of health safety guidelines to set your health protocol.
As a business owner you have to ensure the wellbeing and safety of your employees

PREPARE: What to do next?

Recognize your processes priority and create a command center, start taking action to meet your key stakeholders needs; Identify priority processes and establish a command center. Take actions to meet the needs of your key stakeholders:

  • Recognize priorities and critical processes, that must include important functions as payroll, healthcare, and supply chain if applicable, also the particularly important processes and services as payments and necessary healthcare insurance, coverage, and banking services.
  • Create a command center for a workforce that can work virtually to measure the quality, productivity, people insights, engagement, and the employees’ well-being.
Start working on a customer- oriented plan

PREDICT: What to do for the longer term?

  • Start working on a customer- oriented plan that is supportable and arrange your actions to help you anticipate the impact of the situation instability.
  • Create and distribute highly skilled teams, that can remotely work at any time, from anywhere and will be able to deliver and cater customer commitments.
  • Create a broader system in the organization to facilitate working and collaboration across a set of priorities such as healthcare and childcare, which will lead to improving employees emotional and engagement levels, resulting in a better business performance and outcome.

Conclusion...

Remember, empathetic leadership and communications are two key areas that aid human resilience in difficult times.

You can check online for further recommendations and insights on how to face and conquer the current situation, in the best way possible.

I work in a very considerate company where we treasure our mental and personal happiness, we collaborate as a team to make sure that all team members are satisfied, and that our wellbeing is in the best shape, so our company came up with the idea of providing other companies with trainings in which we provide structure and skills  that allow them to embrace the same mentality we have in Pinnacle.

As well as a new Balanced score card – Management Performance Measurements program supports re-evaluating the companies’ situations.

Remember, empathetic leadership and communications are two key areas that aid human resilience in difficult times

We support all kinds of businesses to find their own way in this stressful period, and to help them conquer the situation with the least amount of losses.

We help their leaders to know and lead their employees in a smart way, so that they become resilient to COVID-19 impact; and to help them reach their goals in such unorthodox situation.

Pinnacle is a multi-country consultancy firm. Our consultants are spread around the world; with 70% of our consultants are women. We have built our organization on modern business model with agility, diversity, and resilience to the business dynamics. We have chosen our technology platform to support our modern mindset thus we work from anywhere.

As work is not a place anymore. We implement Lean Six Sigma in everything we do whether internally or externally at our client sites.

Please use contact us and one of our business development managers will be calling you to support

This article is written by:
Abbeya Elessawy
Abbeya Elessawy
Pinnacle Organizational Consultant
Pinnacle Ltd.

Pinnacle Ltd. is a multi-countries modern consultancy firm, with offices around 11 countries in 4 continents, and 28 consultants working remotely and virtually managed.

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