Justin Cobb Tackles The Holiday Season At The Office

Slowing down for the holidays is natural, it almost seems like a compulsory tradition, it’s a time to enjoy friends and family, and to be thankful. Never take your eyes off the prize tho, don’t lose sight of your goals, but it is acceptable to take it down a gear and take some well-deserved downtime. From experience, Justin Cobb knows that when you’re managing or leading a team at work, and it’s your responsibility to set the pace and lead by example, then it’s essential during the holidays that you find the happy medium when it comes to encouraging the Christmas jollies within the office.

Justin says, “you never want to be that boss who bans Christmas, but you also cannot afford to let everyone unwind at their desks and start slacking off just because it’s the countdown to Christmas day.” Most of us will have fun childhood memories about the build-up to the holidays when most teachers let us color in exercise sheets for an hour, let us listen to music, chat amongst ourselves and generally do nothing, right? Justin Cobb believes some managers repeat the same tradition at their company. “Imagine the slacking off that some workers get away with when your office has an excuse to become a jolly,” he says. This should be avoided at all costs. He’s not by any means suggesting the cancelling of Christmas or the office party, no really, your colleagues deserve the whole nine yards this year, no holding out on them. But here’s the key to doing it right: do it outside of the office. Far, far away.

Wanna’ have a few cold ones with the team? Perfect, but first, set the goals in the office, make sure targets are met before the reward is given, and even encourage an early finish if you like, “will see the incentive pay off when your team does four hours work in two” says Justin. But it’s so vital that any non-work activities and goofing around happen outside of the workspace, otherwise if you let standards slip where they matter the most, then productivity will suffer. A productive and effective workspace has boundaries set in place for good reason, the team should respect the rules in work hours and any leisure time like lunch, texting, and social media scrolling are spent far away from their desks. This is vital in order to prevent workers from losing respect for the number one use of those walls; to get busy.

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