Are you burning the candle at both ends and struggling to keep up a professional attitude when confronted with challenging economic conditions? The fitness of your business – and yourself – may need you to have a step back.
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Do you always say yes to clients if they demand a particular deadline, even though you understand that it will result in extended overtime and all-nighters for your staff?
Overworking staff has turned into a negative trend in South Africa. This often happens when staff and contractors are billed per hour. Often, they are anticipated to meet up crazy deadlines, working during the night or having 12 to 18-hour workdays.
After doing this for just two months, I’ve been dealing with a businessman who’s now suffering from cardiovascular disease, kidney failure and suffering in his marriage.
1. Too little sleep can cause depression, cardiovascular disease and diabetes
Dr Matthew Walker , Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California says that sleeping significantly less than seven hours a day leads to a rise of depression by 22%, cardiovascular disease by 73% and diabetes by 18%.According to Walker, too little sleep lowers our empathy levels. This could be seen in a report that revealed that through the American Fall (Autumn) periods, when daylight saving hours are applied, legal judges usually give heavier sentences than if they have one hour longer to sleep during the night.
Whenever we have significantly less than six hours of sleep, our brains have a tendency to enter fight and flight mode, we are more irritable, and we’re susceptible to errors. Automobile accidents even increase.
2. It’s vital that you say no
Employees that battle to say no could be experiencing Co-dependency , meaning that they often times find their satisfaction and self-worth in rescuing others. We often call them the ‘people pleasers’, the yes-men and women which will do everything for everybody else – even with their own detriment, finally burning out and finding yourself in hospital.
Tip: Offer your employees assertiveness training or coaching sessions in order to be enabled to operate a vehicle win-win situations for the business, your client and themselves.
3. Set clear expectations with clients
- Have an agile approach. Reprioritize tasks every fourteen days with your client.
- Be clear on what’s realistic and what’s not.
- Add a supplementary buffer of time to your timelines to make sure that you can meet up with the deadlines.
- Should something appear that will result in a huge time delay, immediately communicate this to your client, and move the deadlines.
4. Keeping quiet isn’t communicating
Dr John Gottman researched why maried people get divorced, and among the behaviours he identified actually doesn’t happen in the house, but in the organization context, where you want to ‘divorce’ a team member, a leader and a good CEO.
- Stonewalling. When one party is upset with another, or ashamed, they simply come across their cave and prevent communicating. That is extremely damaging to your relationship with a customer if a manager ‘stonewalls’ their team, plus they don’t get access to a mentor or a coach to steer them through a hard conversation with a customer.
- If you’re a leader as well as your coping mechanism is to stonewall, notice what you are really doing, and the damage that it’s causing your team, your clients as well as your company.
- The necessity for time-outs. In case you are feeling overwhelmed and need a time-out my tip is this, require a few minutes to assemble your thoughts, and give yourself a time-limit to escape your cave.
- Talk to your associates that they mustn’t frustrate you when you’ve asked for a time-out, but adhere to your deadline to be able to continue to rationally searching for a win-win in the problem. <