Workplace Doctor: learn to improvise on staff responsibilities during Ramadan

UAE business leader must balance planned work with short-term demands to keep operations smooth for international clients during the limited hours observed for Ramandan.

We are in the midst of Ramadan and my team of 50 — a mix of Muslims and non-Muslims — are working reduced hours. However, because the company I work for deals with dozens of international clients, the demands on our time and resources are the same. How can I compress what needs to be done in a normal working day into the reduced time frame? AA, Abu Dhabi

This is of course a common challenge. Your version of it is made slightly more complex because the team is quite big at 50, and it is a mixed team where some members will be observing Ramadan and others will not. For me, the critical thing here is careful planning.

In all probability, given that your team deals with international clients, your workload is a mix of things that you can plan in advance (proactive planning) and sudden, short-term demands that you need to be able to absorb into the daily tasks (reactive responding). So the first thing to do is to decide what percentage of the things your team does are short-term reactive things. Make sure that every day, across your team, there is enough reactive time available to meet these short term customer-led demands.

Next, prioritise your planned work. This is the work which is not short term and reactive but which you know is coming. As far as possible, allocate this work in advance to named members of your team. Make sure that each team member knows exactly what they are to do, and make sure they can handle the work you are planning to give them.

So now you have made provision for the short-term reactive need and you have proactively planned for and distributed the work you know is coming. The challenge is this: can the plan realistically be delivered, and does it cope with the workload?

If you clearly do not have enough resources – even when you plan carefully, schedule in advance and allow for the short-term nature of some client requests – then you need to consider bringing in some temporary extra staff. You won’t have much time to train them, so apply them to the low skills tasks which can be quickly mastered, and team them with experienced people who will be able to keep an eye on them.

You can also encourage your regular staff to step up to the challenge: work smarter, not harder. Be punctual, work efficiently, don’t fritter away time in idle conversation. Get the team committed to taking on this logistics challenge and beating it. Create an achievement culture so that people want to succeed rather than complain.

You can and should also use your position as leader to analyse rigorously the demands from clients. Can any legitimately be held until after Ramadan? If they can be, then make that happen.

I think it is important that the workload during Ramadan is still distributed evenly across your 50 people. It may be divisive if you split the load and ask your non-Muslim community to pick up more of the weight. An unintended consequence of this might be to weaken the bonds that hold the team together.

So you have done all the above, prepared yourself as well as you can, yet still you worry that client demands cannot be met. What can you do about that? Often the best thing is to be transparent about the difficulty. Use media vehicles like your website, the signature bloc on emails and your recorded messages on telephones to remind customers that it is Ramadan and that special arrangements are in place to minimise the effect of this on customers. Use language to make it clear that you are offering the very best service you can, but that like every other company it is important to you to support your employees as they observe the requirements of Ramadan.

From time to time every organisation has to manage the unintended consequences of external events. If you are seen to be doing everything you can to minimise the effect on customers, then in my experience those same customers will be appreciative of the efforts you are making.

Doctor's prescription: The companies whose reputations will suffer are those who do not appear to be doing all they can to manage the situation … so make sure your organisation is not one of them.

Roger Delves is director of the Ashridge Executive Masters in Management and adjunct professor at Hult International Business School. He is co-author of the book The Top 50 Management Dilemmas: Fast Solutions to Everyday Challenges. Email him at [e-mail] for advice on any work issues

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