Effective Team Management - 6 Simple Strategies

If I was to apply the 8020 to look for, what are the handful of systems that we do at Systemology that helps to manage and monitor performance of team members to make sure that they're following process? What are the systems that I would say are the most important or are the most important for us now? That system for not following systems is one that hit me recently as an aha moment and I thought that's so obvious. We have the system for creating systems and everybody has probably was just blinding flash of the obvious for me. So that's actually a newer innovation for us. We were doing it almost like Jonathan was talking about, which was a little bit more intuitively we were doing it, but it wasn't something that was documented and shared with the team. But there are a handful of other systems and I almost see these like early warning signals. Before we get to the point of having to escalate and have those challenging conversations, we need to give the team member as much as we can and get early warning systems in place so that we can avoid getting to that point. And also like playing chess, we get all of our pieces lined up so that when we have that conversation, we've given them every possible opportunity. So the systems and I'll run through five of them. The first one is you'll need some level of time tracking. I believe every business is a little bit different. Whether it's software that you use or timesheets or end of day reports, you need some way to account for what is getting done in the business. If you want the team member to be allocating their time to the highest value tasks and you want to be delegating down, you need to be conscious of where their time is going and the supervisors need to be aware of this. So you need to think, do you currently have something in place for time tracking? And depending on the challenges that you've got will depend on maybe how detailed you need to go. But at the very least, an end of day email to you saying, here's what I did for the day, here's what I'm doing tomorrow. Here are some questions that I have that would be at the very least, the more that we've done it, we use a platform called Clockify and it's the next level. And I know some businesses rolling out timesheet software and things like that can be a challenge, but you need some way to know where you or where the money is getting spent. If time is money and you're paying for people, where is that money going? What Is it that they're working on? So that's the first one. The next one is your one on ones. Whoever is the supervisor of that team member needs to have some regular meetings. It'll depend on the team member how frequently. I would say it doesn't need to be more than weekly and probably not less than fortnightly. But you need to meet with the team member and then look at what's going on. What are they working on? Look at their timesheet. Be driven by the timesheet. What are you working on? Where is your time going? Give them feedback. Is that something that's sucking time? Could that be better systemized? Could it be delegated down? Talk about their systems, how you can help to support them. You manage via the systems. Ah, that looks like it's taking a lot of time. Do we even need to be doing that? Oh wow. We're doing four hours every single day on this particular task. That sounds like it's just copy and paste. Can we get AI to do that in 1/10 of the time? There needs to be some level of where is the time going? And then there needs to be some level of discussion around can we do that better? So that's the next bit I would say around managing these team members. The next one is these time in motion. This can only happen a little bit further down and I showed you this last week and I can make some extra training on it. One, you need to have all of your foundations and infrastructure right for this to work though, because you ultimately want to go, who's responsible for what tasks, which ones are documented, how long should they be taking? How much of your time is being allocated to these recurring tasks versus new tasks and understanding that every team member is different. Typically most skilled team members will have the least amount of documentation that they're going from. Less skilled team members will be ones that will be very process driven. That it's documented down to this task takes this long, but once you get to that it helps supervisors also manage and go, hey, I know this task takes two hours and you're consistently logging four hours on it. Can you show me what you're doing? We obviously need to train you again or we need to revisit the process or something. Here is not quite right now. You only need to do this on the essential elements of business, those critical tasks that are documented. Again, there's a whole wave of once off type tasks and project based things that never even get to the point of having super detailed systems. It's a little bit about that the next one is the performance reviews at the end of the year or every six months. You then want the high level review process and it should have some reference to systems and processes. Maybe it's one of your core values, maybe and it relates to that. Performance review also relates to reviewing of wages and asking for a pay raise and what might that look like and what are the key performance indicators related to that particular role. So if you work through here, it's like super granular. What are you doing from a day to day, then level up? How do we manage that? Then how do we do some sort of analysis on that and then how do we then performance manage that? So we can constantly work towards that and give that feedback and let them know that this is important. We're process driven and this is part of your performance review. You think about how systems weaves into all of these and then the last one is your supervisors then need to be trained on this. Your supervisor needs to know what to look for in a timesheet. When does the timesheet look wrong? When is it clear that someone's taking advantage of the situation? When things a certain time suck, they need training on how to run one on ones. What should be covered, what should they be discussing, what questions should they ask? Time and motion. There needs to be training and understanding on that. And then equally for performance reviews, it's like tying all of those together equally, the training around the system for unfollowed systems so that they can then execute on that. Now if you're a small business, you are the supervisor and you will be needing to do elements of this yourself. But this is. We'll work towards this. This is not going to happen straight out of the gate. But if you're wondering why people aren't following process because things aren't clear, those expectations aren't met and you don't have a way to then manage that.

Just a heads up, that clip was taken from a session in our Systems Champion certification program, which is the world's first and only program for systems champions to help you build a systems culture and develop an AI first approach and roll it out inside your organization. To find out more, head over to systemology.com systemschamp and I'll see you in.