This post was updated on May 2, 2025
It’s always wise to be prepared for an economic slowdown, especially in volatile times. Astute leaders understand the enduring wisdom of proactive preparation. One aspect of preparation that often gets overlooked or ignored is training workers.
Professional development is often the first thing to go in uncertain economic times; but in my experience, this is a mistake. Upskilling your team offers what they need to operate at peak performance and absorb growth in a good economy, and it prepares companies to do more with less during an economic downturn. Equipping teams with the resilience and skills to navigate any environment ensures continued productivity and stability.
Volatile economic times underscore the ongoing need for businesses to be agile and adaptable. This article directly addresses this imperative. Below, you’ll find actionable strategies to prepare your team.
“Do More With Less” Is Not a Plan
When the time comes to stop hiring, or to lay off workers, you may be tempted to tell your remaining employees, “We will just need to do more with less.” But wishing it doesn’t make it so. Unless you have a team of slackers (doubtful), they are already working as efficiently as they know how. And if they knew how to work more efficiently, don’t you think they would? (Unless they are “quiet quitting,” by doing the bare minimum to get by. If this is the case, it might have a lot to do with your company culture.)
In general, everyone would love to get more done in less time. But without new skills, your employees will continue to produce the same results.
If you want your teams to “do more with less,” the first step to consider is a workflow management system, since the way most people work is through a collection of habits that have come about over time, out of necessity, without intention.
But unintentional habits create unintentional results.
Systems make things more efficient and more scalable. You think about your organizational systems, but these are on a shaky foundation without personal workflow systems. Yet most professionals don’t have one.
The world-renowned management expert Peter F. Drucker once said, “The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is…to increase the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge workers…The most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution (whether business or non-business) will be its knowledge workers and their productivity.” It follows that ensuring your knowledge workers have the skills to work at peak productivity is a sound investment in your business, whether the economy is booming or slowing.
What Is a Workflow Management System?
A workflow management system is a methodology that allows knowledge workers to manage their work in the most efficient way possible. Such a system is not an app or software. Instead, it is a collection of habits and behaviors.
A modern workflow management system is built for our digital age. In other words, it takes into account the constant distractions a modern worker experiences throughout the day, and it empowers them to protect their attention so that they can focus on achieving their most significant results.
A comprehensive workflow management system also considers the company culture, and empowers leaders to foster a work environment (whether remote, in-office, or hybrid) that supports the behaviors of the workflow management system and sets the stage for employees to operate at peak productivity.
Here’s the good news: When an entire team or company is trained to use the same workflow management system, efficiency can skyrocket. And in the end, the company as a whole actually can “run lean” because each individual worker has trained for it.
Success results from strategic systems.
So Is Your Team Ready to “Run Lean”?
Do you want to know if your company is ready to “run lean” and “do more with less” without burning out your employees? Then evaluate whether your team members have the following skill sets:
Attention Management
Do you and your team members have the skills and systems to resist distractions so they can focus on achieving their most significant results? Do you end your days feeling like you were busy, but not productive? Reactive, but not proactive? Learning attention management skills will put you and your team members back in the driver’s seat of your work and your lives.
Action Management
Do your team members keep their tasks and commitments in a variety of locations: to-do lists, sticky notes, calendars, notes apps? If so, this is like trying to do a puzzle when all the pieces are scattered throughout the house. Learning a task management process that holistically addresses all the various aspects of your personal and professional lives will save everyone time, greatly reduce stress, and decrease the opportunity for details to get lost in the shuffle. When a whole team or company “speaks the same language” for organizing work, the result is an exponential increase in efficiency and productivity.
Communication Management
Do members of your team check email the first thing in the morning? Do they feel they need to respond to messages right away? Do leaders have a communication policy in place that explicitly defines which types of messages should use which communication channels at which times? A good workflow management system offers clearly-defined personal and communication practices that help team members spend less time in inboxes, and more time moving important projects forward.
Burnout Management
Are your workers feeling stressed or disengaged? Do they lack energy, physically or emotionally? One of the biggest threats to knowledge worker productivity is burnout. Once your workers start to burn out, it’s harder (and much more expensive!) to get them back on track. Instead, an effective workflow management system proactively prevents burnout by teaching work-life balance skills, alerting team members to the signs of burnout, and helping leadership implement the most effective policies to support work-life balance.
Behavior Change Management
Giving your team new skills is one thing. Supporting their adoption and preventing the team from sliding back into old habits is something else entirely. Everyone knows that changing habits is hard, so learning the most effective ways to do that protects any training investment and helps make new learning stick.
Culture Change Management
Do you have an “always-on” work culture? Do leaders talk about “work-life balance,” but then email employees over the weekend? The biggest obstacle to empowering productivity is a company culture that supports the “old ways,” like treating everything like an emergency, unintentionally making information inaccessible, and relying on others to provide what they need to get their work done instead of proactively accessing what they need. To be effective, a workflow management system needs to offer strategies for transforming the culture into one that supports new, more productive behaviors.
The Empowered Productivity™ System
Over the past two decades, I have trained tens of thousands of leaders and team members at all levels of an organization on the workflow management system I’ve spent decades creating and testing. It’s called the Empowered Productivity System. As I work with leaders across the globe to help their teams “do more with less,” my team and I are constantly refining this system. Today, Empowered Productivity is performing better than ever, helping leaders and team members deliver their best results with far less stress.
This is possible because Empowered Productivity is a comprehensive system of habits and behaviors. When workers can rely on a system to manage their work, far fewer decisions are necessary about how to manage their work every day. Instead, they can focus their energy and attention on actually doing the creative or strategic work you hired them for in the first place.
If you’re interested in Empowered Productivity training for your team, please reach out to me here. I look forward to speaking with you about how to get your team operating at peak productivity right now, so you’re always ready to do more with less during a recession.
