Keeping Workers' Attention During the Holidays

Firm work priorities combined with flexible schedules will make the season bright

By Liz Ryan

Holiday season craziness combined with Dec. 31 year-end (or quarter-end) pressures push many a corporate leader over the edge. Amid holiday travel planning, online shopping, and in-office good cheer, it’s too easy to let the actual work slide until after the holidays. How can you make employees focus on their responsibilities rather than the tins of vendor-donated holiday treats? Here are five tips to help managers foster some yuletide fellowship without sinking the departmental-objectives boat.

Talk About It
Wise managers will chat with their teams about the December game plan, making sure that goals for the month are realistic and well-communicated. The month of December vies with the lazy days of summer for the time when concentration among team members drops to an annual low. Clarify your group’s objectives for the month, assign person-by-person to-dos and timelines, and plan a celebration for when the goals are met. That way, your folks can enjoy their holiday merry-making and have a good shot at getting some work done, too.

Be Clear About Gifts and Outings
For many a corporate supervisor and HR professional, holiday lunch and holiday gift issues cause heartburn, rife as they are with elements of fairness (or perceived unfairness), appropriateness, and the risk of hurt feelings. If your company lacks a gift-giving policy or guidelines on departmental lunches and other outings around the holidays, talk over the issues and agree on a simple and logical plan. If your organization hosts a holiday party, ditto. That way, you can prevent holiday-merriment misunderstandings or perceived slights from becoming the soap opera topic for your team in December.

Avoid Forced Fun
Compulsory fun is a 100 percent preventable employee-morale virus that rages through the workplace at this time of year. Whatever you do as a manager, don’t mandate or otherwise pressure your employees to participate in any holiday events you’ve dreamed up, from drinks after work to the dreaded Secret Santa exercise. Let your employees decide for themselves which, if any, company-sponored holiday fun they’d like to partake of. If you offer folks a chance to leave the office—for instance, an afternoon at Dave & Buster’s during mid-December—give them the opportunity to go home or go shopping instead. Nothing spells misery like an afternoon of ear-splitting confinement in an arcade hall when you’d rather be doing something else.

Talk About 2011 Goals
Goal-setting make sense any time of year, but a collective 2011 forecasting process in December is especially timely. Getting clarity on 2012 goals will help your team members focus on the future and on their progress as you wrap up 2010. Having a clear picture of what needs to happen in 2012—beginning with January, right around the corner—will help you avoid the wasted-work-month syndrome that can so easily derail your best-laid business plans.

Encourage Discussion About Life-Work Struggles
Holiday shopping, expenses, and logistics can bring major social stress for your team. Encourage people to talk about what’s going on for them, to get issues out on the table and addressed quickly. For instance, if you have a team member who is overwhelmed by his shopping list (three kids and 14 nieces and nephews, perhaps), you could say, “Stan, do you want to spend this morning getting that off your plate? Do your online shopping, and let’s meet at 1 p.m. to talk about the marketing plan.” If “your life stops at the company threshold” is an unrealistic message at any time of year, that time is now. The more you can shine light on and surmount your team’s life-work challenges now, the more likely you are to get your employees’ support when you need it.

Liz Ryan is an expert on the new-millennium workplace and a former Fortune 500 HR executive.