Drills for Skills
Drills in dog field work are exercises designed to maintain or correct or enhance performance on the field. It can also be applied to small business operations as we learned first hand recently.
In today’s hybrid and remote work place, it seems at a moment’s notice an intended face to face meeting can suddenly become hybrid or remote as people continue to test positive for COVID. Or a critical member has a personal or other work situation arise that prevents them from being in person for the meeting. Both of these situations occurred at a recent meeting of the Professional Women’s Idea Exchange Group that I chair. It was a revelation for my company to say the least.
First, when a meeting goes virtual last minute, and you are the organizer or the presenter, do you have the technology to adapt at the last minute? Such technology would include the paying edition of Zoom, a WiFi Hotspot, also an additional financial burden on the small business owner, a very good working knowledge of PowerPoint, and the ability to share documents on the screen while not losing any of the virtual participants? Sadly, we were not able to answer Yes to all these questions.
We are finding that colleagues with a corporate position just assume everyone has those same big company resources they enjoy. Not the case. But it is a good exercise to run your company through before it actually happens to you.
You will often see dog owners going through drills with their performance dogs. Well, we, as small business owners, also need to put ourselves, our staff, and our company through drills. Become more adept at virtual conferencing, pay if you can for the upgraded versions that do not have time constraints. Check your technology for things like loose wires, burned out bulbs, working cameras. If one goes, the entire presentation may go with it!
Surviving and thriving in the new world order of hybrid and remote work, calls for us to be adept at more then just adding a telephone to conference in those not able to attend in person. It requires virtual meeting skills. And those skills require drills if you only need them or use them once in a while.
Don’t get caught out on the field without the right set of skills. Drills for skills, it will improve your professionalism and your work performance. Best of all, you will no longer have bones of contention with those people changing plans last minutes.
Be well.
