Skip to main content

Tag: Team

5 Tips to Employee Engagement for Remote Teams

Written by Andre Oentoro on . Posted in Articles.

After hiring candidates, companies often ignore the importance of their employees’ well-being. If you’re wondering why some companies can have a high turnover rate, regardless of how popular they are among giant names, the percentage of employee engagement is one of those contributing factors to this situation.

While managers can set up a fun activity to keep their employees engaged at the office, they can’t really do the same now due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This dreadful situation has forced many to put employees’ safety first. Hence, working from home isn’t that odd anymore.

That doesn’t mean managers can’t initiate an employee engagement program on remote terms. This article will dive into how businesses can thrive by improving employee engagement even though they are working away from the office.

Advertisement
[widget id=”custom_html-68″]

The Importance of Employee Engagement

Employees are companies’ biggest assets. Keeping them happy at your workplace will greatly benefit your business. After all, happy employees will do their best at work, resulting in better outcomes.

Here are a few benefits of getting your employees engaged.

Reduce turnover rates

Turnover is often one of the manager’s biggest enemies when it comes to ensuring a running project. Sometimes employees can quit at a time when companies need them the most, and that’s something managers can’t avoid or hold them to stay longer. This is where employee engagement plays a big part in avoiding this situation.

When companies pay attention to employees’ difficulties at work and provide them with a solution that helps overcome the situation, employees can put more trust in the organization. More trust means higher loyalty, which decreases their consideration to move out.

This can be done if the company provides a number of onboarding processes via training videos to help employees get the experience of what they can expect from the company. The onboarding also improves the communication between the company and employees so that they get engaged from the get-go.

Improve productivity

Productivity has been linked to employees’ ability to finish a task and handle a situation in a timely manner. But when said employees are unable to concentrate at work, whether it’s from internal or external problems, they may lose their performance. If companies have engaged with employees well, things that may potentially reduce productivity can be identified and avoided quickly.

Better customer service

Enthusiastic employees at work bring such a positive vibe around them. This can often be seen in the way employees treat and communicate with customers. Highly engaged employees don’t see work as an inevitable responsibility as an adult. They consider getting up every day to work to ensure they provide solutions to customers they are communicating with while also benefiting from working.

5 Tips to Improve Employee Engagement for Remote Team

1. Encourage two-way communications

Communication is key in every part of life, including the workplace. Make sure to always have clear communication with employees, so you can get rid of misunderstandings at work.

After all, the workplace is one of the common areas where people get misunderstood easily. If you can’t initiate direct, two-way communication with people working in your organization, they may feel left out and consider you don’t provide the solution they are facing at the moment.

2. Listen to them

Make sure your employees don’t get left out even though they are working on a remote term. While they don’t often show any difficulties because of the distance, managers should ensure if they are doing okay in the first place.

Many won’t initiate a conversation due to location and time differences. That’s why employees keep almost everything about work themselves—asking if they face a certain problem while remote working can improve their connection with you and possibly open up for more conversation in the future.

3. Recognize their efforts

Companies often don’t see what their employees have done in maintaining their performance at work. Managers only see the result without considering how much effort one has put into gaining such an outcome.

Make sure to recognize your employees’ efforts and appreciate them for what they do. After all, everyone’s hard work has made it possible for the company to thrive in this difficult time. So, show them that you acknowledge their work.

4. Reward your employees

The act of acknowledging someone’s work may come in many forms, including giving a simple ‘thanks’ and round applause. While these are common and relatively inexpensive, you can go as far as giving points or a bonus as a reward for their hard work.

Your employees will surely appreciate it if their boss shares gifts or free coupons to the nearest villa when they achieve a goal. It shows that companies take care of their employees by giving them a reward after working hard.

Knowing how companies take little things, such as small wins matter, will improve how employees see their workplace. This convinces them more that they are working in the right place.

5. Create fun activities together

Sometimes working from the home policy can greatly impact employees in terms of getting burnout quickly. Compared when working in the office, employees could say hi to each other and wind down a little bit when the tension was too serious or when the workload was so heavy.

Remote working means the ability to communicate with other teammates is limited, which often causes more stress to employees. In order to avoid a quick burnout, managers can provide fun activities or games virtually. Getting into games can reduce stress and boost the employee’s motivation to work after it’s done.

Takeaway

Remote teams are prone to having burnout because they are limited to doing certain activities like they used to. When employees are easily stressed out without a quick handle from the company, they will feel excluded from the entire organization.

In the long term, such condition may reduce their performance and ownership as they don’t feel connected at all. Managers can handle this situation by taking into consideration what makes these employees engaged again.

It’s crucial to introduce exciting activities to boost up their mood. Make sure to listen to their voices and create a safe space for a private conversation. These will help remote employees engage in the company they are working.

Stakeholder Register: The Unsung Hero

Written by Tony Oliver on . Posted in Articles.

Who is your favorite superhero from the multi-billion-dollar movie franchise Avengers?

Most people would respond with the Hulk, Spiderman, Captain America, or Iron-Man. After all, those characters have been mainstays of Marvel comics for many decades. But they are far from the only ones in the series: Ant-man, Hawkeye, Black Widow, and the Scarlet Witch are a few of the lesser-known members of the super team. Every group has some members who get the glory and front-billing, but it does not mean the others are not essential. Chances are you may have worked on a project in which some of your colleagues’ overshadowed others.

Among project management artifacts, the stakeholder is such an unsung hero. The Who? The What? Exactly.

Chances are your extended project team, or even your sponsor doesn’t know about this document, or why it’s important. But you, as the project manager, should be keen on its powers. Think of how to alter egos that are underestimated in the superhero world, or how smaller members are overlooked until they rise to the occasion and save the day.

Advertisement
[widget id=”custom_html-68″]

Remember all those Shakespeare plays you read in high school? Before the first act, the “dramatis personae” were listed. The descriptions often gave you an idea of their relationship and any conflict which may ensue. Navigating the play without such information would be difficult. Hamlet’s name may title the play, but you’d want to also know about Claudius and his schemes.

The charter, the schedule, and the project management plan get all the glory, but the stakeholder register is key to understanding the others. After all, a project takes people not just to perform the work but also to benefit from the product. Without understanding the stakeholders’ needs, a project will likely miss the mark. This translates not just to a lost opportunity for the organization but also wasted time, money, and goodwill.

The stakeholder management plan also helps keep track of triple constraint impact. We often focus on the project’s priorities, but constraints also exist at the stakeholder and requirement levels. Understanding what makes each stakeholder tick is integral to successfully managing those needs. For younger project managers raised on role-playing games (computer or tabletop), the stakeholder management plan can best be described as a matrix of all the traits and abilities of each participant.

Project managers often fall into the trap of believing stakeholder management is logical and thus can be done on the fly. Others may think their interpersonal skills enable stakeholder management to flow naturally. Seasoned project managers know better, aware of the manners in which stakeholder attitudes may change throughout the project. One’s best friend may become one’s bitter enemy, and a strong proponent may suddenly turn into a source of undesired criticism. Being aware of the stakeholder’s desires and personalities can help the PM prepare for, and avoid such landmines.

Some projects run into difficulties due to the stakeholder management plan not being written down, but this often stems not from laziness but rather a mistaken belief that the PM “knows all about the stakeholders.” Project managers, no matter their tenure in the organization, should not fall into this trap. Crafting the stakeholder management plan:

  • Helps other team members, whose tenure and experience may be limited and not have relationships with the stakeholders. Think about when you first started working for your company, or when you first took on your current role. Your network was likely limited both in terms of knowledge depth and breadth. A well-curated list of stakeholders can save your team from spinning around in circles to find out who is affected by the project and to what degree.
  • Can assist when a stakeholder leaves the organization and a new one comes into the vacated role. It would be ideal to have a project where the stakeholders do not change…but that seldom happens. People retire, take new jobs, are moved to new roles; while some may adequately train their replacements and help them understand their role in the project, PMs should not assume this would always happen. The stakeholder register can help identify gaps and prepare for such personnel transitions.
  • Can help clear misunderstandings. Conflict is unavoidable in projects, but the team should be well-versed on how to solve it. Confusion, on the other hand, can often fester if not clarified. The stakeholder register, when easily accessible by the team, can clarify roles, responsibilities, and areas of interest. Note the stakeholder interest and influence matrix will expand on the topic, so don’t rely on the register by itself.
  • Can facilitate conversations on Roles & Responsibilities. As the project team goes through the Tuckman team Development stages, questions will arise on roles and responsibilities. The stakeholder register can help guide such conversations, proactively prompting the team to analyze who is best suited to tackle individual tasks and oversee specific areas. Vetting these duties against the involved stakeholder areas ensures no affected department is forgotten.
  • Can help craft the change management plan. I’m a firm believer that change management and project management are the two wings of a bird; you need both to fly. A successful change management plan covers the what, how, why, when, where, and how of the current state: future state transition. You can get a head start by ensuring your stakeholder register is complete and thorough.

As with other project management artifacts, it’s key to remember the stakeholder management plan should be revised as needs arise. However, it should always be connected to the underlying stakeholder list. Always ask, after every conversation“, is there someone else you’d recommend I talk to?” This can help not just unlock doors, but also discover doors you didn’t know existed!

How to streamline communication between remote teams?

Written by Mahendra Gupta on . Posted in Articles.

Mike Krzyzewski, an American basketball coach, rightly says, “Effective teamwork begins and ends with communication.”

Indeed, effective communication is one of the cornerstones of a company’s success.

Be it for getting an executive buy-in, conveying regular updates to stakeholders, or managing teams, communication plays a critical role in every facet of the business landscape. It helps convey the requisite information at the right time, facilitates the exchange of innovative ideas, strengthens team bonding and collaboration, and improves work efficiency.

However, ensuring effective communication becomes challenging when the team is dispersed across remote locations. When team members are working in varying time zones and locations, it creates silos, and thus, bringing them on the same page becomes cumbersome for a project manager.

Advertisement
[widget id=”custom_html-68″]

These communication barriers can lead to loss of trust and transparency over time and negatively impact the project’s progress. Therefore, it is vital for a project manager to walk the extra mile and take suitable initiatives to enhance remote team communication.

Enlisted below are a few good strategies that you can follow to achieve the same:

 Tips to foster better communication among remote teams

1. Convey roles and responsibilities clearly

Defining clear roles and responsibilities helps every remote team member understand what is expected of them and align their efforts with the project’s end goals. However, while conveying key responsibility areas (KRAs) in person is easy in a typical in-office work setup, remote work settings make it more arduous. Nevertheless, by using the right tools, the project manager can convey KRAs to remote teammates effectively.

For example, they can use a video conferencing tool for one-on-one meetings or send an email to explain the responsibilities to individuals.  Moreover, an initiation meeting at the start of every project can also help the team members get to know each other better. Additionally, the project manager can elaborate on interdependencies. It will enable the team to comprehend each other’s responsibilities, communicate and collaborate effectively, and synchronize their efforts better to achieve milestones.

  1. Standardize rules for remote communication

As communication is predominantly online, formulating new policies to streamline asynchronous and synchronous means is the need of the hour. Standardized rules help avoid communication gaps or discrepancies and facilitate fast information exchange. To begin with, the project manager can decide on the communication channels to use for various purposes. For instance, synchronous channels such as Zoom, Google Meet, etc., can be suitable for scrum meetings, brainstorming sessions, training, etc.

On the other hand, asynchronous channels like emails, Slack, etc., can be better for instant messaging, casual communication, file sharing, etc. Besides that, setting protocols for away messages, one-on-one meetings with teammates, breaks, etc., can also help save time and regulate communication.

  1. Conduct daily stand-up meetings

As already discussed, teleworking makes communication and coordination an arduous job for a project manager. It also makes it difficult to keep track of the project’s progress. One of the ways to combat this challenge is to organize daily stand-up meetings. Considering everyone’s schedule and availability, managers can fix a time to ensure no one is left out.

Along with updating the progress, team members can mention the roadblocks, if any, and brainstorm on viable solutions. If issues are significant, scheduling separate meetings can be a good option to discuss them. Further, urgent meetings to communicate unprecedented changes or risks can also boost communication and coordination.

  1. Leverage the right tools and technology

Communication is not confined to messages or video calls but goes beyond that. Equipping virtual teams with the right tech inventory is essential for a remote team to enhance it further.  So, besides providing a video conferencing tool or messaging app, a project manager can also leverage various project management, workflow automation, and visual collaboration apps. It not only helps convey and visualize the critical updates in real-time but also centralizes them, thereby minimizing any discrepancies.

A resource management tool can also prove beneficial as it provides enterprise-wide visibility of resources. They can view resources schedules, their utilization, productivity, and even project schedules on one platform. For example, they can see an individual’s forecast-vs-actual time report and note any variance in the time predicted to complete a task and the actual time ten. Further, they can conduct a one-on-one meeting and understand and resolve the cause accordingly.

  1. Organize virtual team-building activities

Virtual team-building sessions play a pivotal role in strengthening communication and collaboration. They replicate those water-cooler conversations and casual cubicle meet-ups in the physical office settings and help get rid of the monotonicity and isolation that set in while working virtually. Further, as different team members participate and interact more, they get to know each other better, which breaks down the silos of communication. All this paves the way for stronger team bonding, transparent communication, and cohesive work.

To make every session more inclusive and productive, the organizer should consider every participant’s preference and customize activities accordingly. This will pique everyone’s interest and elevate engagement.

Conclusion

Effective communication is the bread and butter of remote team management. It facilitates team collaboration, ensures the alignment of efforts with final goals, and eventually boosts productivity.

The aforementioned tips will help you build a powerful communication strategy and build synergy between team members. Since remote work is the new normal, it is high time you took the right measures to improve communication within your dispersed team and seal every project’s success.

Follow Mahendra’s work here.

The Power of Silence in Managing Communication

Written by George Pitagorsky on . Posted in Articles.

Silence can be a self-caring haven. A retreat from the noisy stressful realm of everyday life – bathing in silence. It can be a ground for becoming more self-aware and for collecting one’s thoughts. It can be a way to get someone’s attention. And it can be uncomfortable.

In groups, silence can lead to suboptimal performance when used as a conscious passive-aggressive tactic or is a withholding of information. It may be driven by feelings like conflict aversion, anxiety, shyness, unworthiness, or laziness. Sometimes it is nothing more than forgetting to respond to an email, text, or call that has gone to the bottom of the to-do list. Sometimes it is a means for holding on to power and control.

Advertisement
[widget id=”custom_html-68″]

Silence As a Tactic

A long-respected model identifies five stages of team development – forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. Of these, storming is the most critical and the most difficult to work through, particularly if one or more members of the team are averse to conflict.

Silence as a tactic is the purposeful cutting off of communication, without warning or explanation, to avoid conflict or to freeze out someone who is seen as an opponent, an annoyance, or as a threat to the status quo. This is colloquially called ‘ghosting.’

An Example

In one situation, a manager, Jim, felt threatened by a team member, Sue, who challenged his ideas and raised the need for greater attention to project management processes. The manager did not respond to Sue’s calls, texts, or emails that addressed her concerns. Jim ignored her when she requested a one-on-one conversation. In one instance Jim publicly complemented another team member for something initiated by Sue. Jim made a show of being cordial to Sue in front of others while avoiding any one-on-one contact.

Silence Gets in the Way of Storming

It becomes impossible to address conflicts and address relationship issues when individuals do not allow for dialog by disengaging, ghosting individuals, or otherwise cutting communication. This becomes even more damaging when the team has not gone through a forming process to identify roles, goals, and ground rules.

Without well-managed storming, the team is faced with unhealthy relationships and ineffectual conflict throughout its life. The result is suboptimal performance.

Withholding Input: The Abilene Paradox

Another type of silence in teams is the silence of withholding. It leads to poor decisions and unhealthy relationships because it robs the team of valuable information.

The Trip to Abilene is a story by Jerry B. Harvey about how four intelligent and well-meaning people took an unpleasant trip to somewhere that none of them wanted to go.   One came up with a suggestion to take the trip. Each of the others failed to say that they did not want to go because they did not want to disappoint the others.  The one who made the suggestion also did not want to go, he thought the others might like the trip. Had anyone spoken up and said what they felt and why the group would have been happy to stay put and enjoy their time together at home.

The Abilene Paradox is a phenomenon that takes its name from this anecdote. It is the cause of many a misstep by teams and organizations. People do not speak their mind when what is in their mind is opposed to the perceived general opinion of the people around them. In the paradox, people are consciously aware that they oppose the idea and are acting contrary to their own thoughts and insights.

People don’t speak up because it takes effort to come to the table with a compelling argument. More often they may think that what they have to say is unimportant, stupid, and/or bound to upset someone. They may fear retribution and censure a fear that is quite rational given many examples of persecuted whistleblowers and of the negative effects of arguing against a favored idea, design, plan, etc.

Harvey quoted Herbert Porter a Nixon campaign aid as saying that he “was not one to stand up in a meeting and say that this should be stopped”, a decision he then attributed to “the fear of the group pressure that would ensue, of not being a team player.”  Porter was referring to the Watergate scandal.

Few will risk saying that the emperor is not wearing any clothes. Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes brings out the difficulty of saying what you think. In this story, a vain emperor is tricked into believing that he was getting a suit of clothes that could only be seen by the most intelligent people.  No one but a child had the courage to appear unintelligent and tell the emperor that he wasn’t wearing any clothes.  The emperor himself was too vain to admit that even he couldn’t see the new suit.

Whatever the reason, not speaking up results in suboptimal performance and trips to Abilene.

What to Do – Mindfully Manage Communications

Silence whether it is used as a tactic or is the withholding of information, damages team performance.

It can be addressed by paying conscious attention to the communication process.  Managing communication is arguably the most important aspect of project management. With well-managed communication, teams can avoid or heal unhealthy relationships, address conflicts, and make the most effective decisions

The communication process must be a subject for team discussion and fine-tuning to address the issue of silence. This is best done during the forming stage of team development as part of setting ground rules. Regular attention to the communication process is needed throughout the team’s life to make sure that the ground rules are effective and are being followed.

Mindfulness, self-awareness, self-management, as well as respect and empathy for others, are foundations for effective communication. Cultivate these and do your best to ensure open communication.

Navigating Project Management with a Hybrid Team

Written by Brian Sims on . Posted in Articles.

Project management has forever been changed by COVID in both subtle and significant ways. In my world – government contracting – it previously would have been unimaginable to work anywhere but at the client’s site. Since the pandemic, change surrounds us. I hesitate to call it the ‘new normal’ because nothing is normal about our situation today, whether you are in the public or private sector. As PMs, we’ve come to expect change and to shift our project management mindset accordingly (and sometimes daily!) by asking ourselves, “What will it take to meet the needs of this project?”

Managing a hybrid workforce represents one of the most significant changes ushered in by the pandemic. While we might have dabbled in it before, widespread adoption of hybrid is here to stay. And frankly overdue. Leading a dispersed workforce demands that project managers drill down to an individualized level. It requires looking at the work differently, identifying each employee’s strengths, weaknesses, and availability to determine how they can best contribute to the team.

Advertisement
[widget id=”custom_html-68″]

Operationally, there are several aspects of project management to consider with a hybrid workforce. Here are the ones I rank in the top five:

  1.  Realign your hybrid workforce with project needs  

Working 9 to 5 in an office used to be the norm, with limited flexibility about where and when employees worked. The pandemic proved that many employees can be productive remotely and outside of core hours. PMs need to realign project tasks with new flexibility, mapping a new path to project milestones. Harvard Business Review published a hybrid matrix model I like with four quadrants:

  • Work anywhere during set hours
  • Work in the office during set hours
  • Work in the office anytime
  • Work anywhere, anytime.

By dissecting the elements of project work and identifying specifically which item falls into which quadrant of the model, we can manage all employees with predictability and stability. The goal is that each person on your team knows what they must accomplish and the deadline so they can schedule daycare, uninterrupted work time, collaboration, and a work-life balance.

  1. Manage individuals for engagement and productivity

Once we reassess the project needs, we also need to reassess the available resources – our employees. That starts with knowing each employee’s strengths and weaknesses. I use a Strengths-Based Leadership Model and the Clifton Strength Finders Assessment. With metrics in hand, you can balance your teams in terms of strengths and hybrid availability, ensuring you have the right coverage and resources.

This individualized approach is time-consuming, but correctly applied, this approach can save PM’s time over the lifecycle of the project. Consider sharing strength results with each employee within the context of how the strengths help the employee meet organizational goals, project goals, and personal goals. These insights often reveal what truly motivates each employee (it’s not always money).

  1. Policies and governance for hybrid teams 

With a hybrid workforce, your employee handbook and project guidelines need to become living documents. You’ll need policies designed for maximum flexibility. Rather than focusing on what employees can or cannot do, policies need to be written to ensure employees have all the tools they need.

Some policies might require trial and error to get things right. For example, when we have team meetings now, we ask everyone to dial in to the conference line individually to listen, regardless of where they are working, and to turn on their camera when they are talking. This saves bandwidth and makes “face time” equitable between those in the office and those working elsewhere.

  1. Developing a dispersed culture

Many PMs manage teams who are in multiple locations, and large organizations have shown us how culture and values can span the miles. What I will emphasize here is that culture in a hybrid workforce demands more communication.

Weekly emails, quarterly leadership calls, daily check-ins all help to replace the

face-to-face interaction of the past. Establishing new routines, like having teams eat lunch together once a week via a video call, provide a casual ‘watercooler’ environment that helps employees get to know each other on a more personal level. We understand others better when we communicate face-to-face and can pick up on the nonverbal cues, whether in person or via video.

When the communication is two-way, and employees feel heard, hybrid culture really shines. Since everyone’s work preferences are (hopefully) being met through hybrid flexibility, you have an organization where everyone buys into the culture and people recognize that their behavior and their contribution matter.

  1. Metrics for a hybrid workforce 

PM has undergone a shift in metrics that highlights a hybrid workforce. The trend now is to focus on the outcome rather than output.

The outcome mindset measures value based on individual contributions to the end result. Were objectives met? Is the client satisfied? Are teammates satisfied with the balance of contribution across the team? These are metrics we need to measure for a hybrid workforce. The focus shifts to determining if teammates are contributing in substantial and meaningful ways. The team dynamic becomes so important that you may want to consider adding 360-degree feedback from peers as part of your PM processes.

Bottom line

Project management with a hybrid workforce comes down to three factors: flexibility, individuality, and communication. It’s a change brought on by the pandemic but exactly the shake up the working world needed.

The same flexibility that allows our teams to accomplish tasks at various times and places drives agility in other areas of the organization.

The focus on individuals and their contributions to the collective outcome pushes us to take a deeper look at the human beings on our payroll and gain insights into what satisfies their personal and professional goals.

Communicating differently, and more purposefully, has helped with a greater understanding of the organization and project goals. And it gives a voice to each individual and drives a deeper level of team engagement.

So even though we may be dispersed, our teams are closer than ever before.