Mistakes on the job go up during holiday times. It’s human nature to be distracted by personal things at work. So what can you do? While this can be a wonderful time of year, it can also bring out more stress in employees. Our minds are on planning time with family/friends, buying presents, preparing food, or making travel arrangements. Personal as well as work relationships can be strained. It is human nature for our minds to be distracted with personal issues during the holiday season. So when our minds are not on our job, work errors go up.
Often we try to implement stricter procedures or give verbal reprimands or give strikes to try to force people to concentrate and make less mistakes. This is what we call ‘doing it the hard way’. Trying to change people to concentrate more during the holidays is like herding cats – it does not work. As a matter of fact, it increase stress, adding to the ‘mental overload’.
So what’s the solution to reduce work errors? Make changes that you have control over such as system or process changes. A simple fix is to add in more safeguards or checkpoints throughout the process to catch errors faster during times when people are predictably stressed such as during the holidays. It may take a little longer but it will save you time and money in the long run. We all know, the sooner mistakes are caught, the cheaper they can be repaired.
Planning ahead for these times when employees are commonly distracted like the holidays will take stress everyone, even those forced to come down harder on employees to try to reach company goals and standards. You’ll all enjoy the holiday season more.
Jean Brownlie, WorkerSmarts LLC
