Every now and then most places of business face some sort of crisis, some big and some small, but all-and-all it is a crisis of some sort that needs to be dealt with. A few years ago we had a tight work team and everyone worked well together and we also knew each other well enough that we did some family socializing together. We had been working together for about 4-5 years, when out of the blue one of the team members called on a Sunday and "left a message" on the service that they had left their key under the back door mat and had found another job! That was it, no good-bye, no explanation, nothing. The rest of the team was devastated to say the least, we felt like someone had died suddenly and there was no closure. The business owner tried to call our former teammate but they would not answer their phone, it was terrible for us who were left wondering what had happened and why. We all were depressed and it was hard to keep the "happy face" we normally had for our customers, and when people asked where our missing team member was we just had to make up a story that something suddenly came up and she no longer was with us, and we were sad about it (which was the truth). As the office manager, I knew that I needed to get things back on the track fast before things got too bad for all of us. I knew a really nice person that wanted a job, but was not sure if the medical profession was for her and asked if she would come on-board to help us out and if it worked out well for her and us then great, but if she didn’t like the job then that was okay too, as long as she allowed us time to find someone to fill the position. This was the perfect solution for us, as our new person kept our minds off of what had happened and we were kept busy with training and keeping things moving forward. As it turned out our temporary employee did not feel this was the right job for her, but she was happy to help out until we found the right person to replace her, which we did about a month later. Surviving a workplace crisis can be very difficult, it took months for our team to really be able to put behind us the feeling of betrayal and disappointment, but we did by focusing on our team and what we had to offer our patients. The most important thing we learned was that when an unexpected crisis happens, you need to figure out what has to be done in order to keep moving forward and not dwell on what happened. It doesn’t mean that we did not deal with our feelings over what had happened, we did that together as a team, we shared our grief and disappointment, but realized that if we were going to continue to provide great customer service we needed to come together and move in the right direction as a team. The article link below is a good one on realizing signs that your workplace maybe facing a crisis, we did not have any signs that we knew of then, but maybe had we known of these signs things might have been different, but we did survive and that is what really matters.
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