David Jenyns and Glenn cover tracking where your team's time actually goes using project management tools and timesheets, then balancing workload through supervisory oversight. They stress skill-based benchmarks for new hires and warn against bureaucracy that kills productivity.
Quick one, just around managing workload. So we're sort of just starting out with one person actually. We found a unicorn direct going really well, but just sort of managing the workload and sort of visibility on that workload to make sure that they've got enough to go on with but not too overloaded. Do you guys have some systems or little tools that you guys use to manage that?
I'll speak briefly to that and then I'd love your thoughts on that, Glen. It's definitely something that you need to create the space and have appropriate supervision from department heads or someone to be asking and looking at where workload is. So you obviously want to build a culture of transparency and that involves probably having a project management program that clearly catches the tasks that are being assigned to whom and when and when things are getting marked off, coupled with some form of time sheet, whether that's taking snapshots or they're just filling in or clocking time just to understand where the time is going and then having someone think about and oversee just like you would normally like a supervisor. Like, what are you working on? Is this the highest value task? How else can I support you? Do you need extra work? Because sometimes that thing Rodney was talking about, about them speaking up and avoiding confrontation, if you sometimes don't ask or create the space for it, they're not necessarily going to volunteer that, oh, I've got loads of capacity. Can I have more tasks? And it's easy to just throw more bodies at it when you could be making team members more effective. So this is something that we've worked on at Systemology over the years and we've gone through periods where we've been heavily over bloated with staff and you'll prune back and you won't actually notice a drop in productivity or output. And it's just around how you're managing things and what the culture is of your organization. It's the same when you build any team. Like you want a team of a players who get down, who get the work done and if you don't fit into that culture, then maybe you should find somewhere else to work.
I don't know if you've got anything to add to that, Glenn.
A little bit. I would always look at like what's the level of complexity of the task you want them to do and what's the level of skill the team member has because you might be expecting. You're not going to expect a newly hired team member to complete like a complex task in the span of time. That you're thinking you're they're going to complete them. So maybe put a benchmark that, okay, at this point, a month after you're hired, you should be able to complete this task in an hour and then maybe second month definitely as time goes by, it gets shorter and so from there and you'll see. So I used to give you just say 10, 10 of these tasks a day because you were starting, but now I can already give you more because at this point in your employment you should already be at a point where you are getting grasp of everything like faster.
And as you grow the first team member, you're going to have to learn things as you go and keep on it and who's going to manage them. And those first couple of team members that you work closely with can be ones that become really strong and may end up leading other team members later. But you add extra levels of complexity and management as you continue to grow. And it's that constant balance between not putting in too much bureaucracy for the sake of it and red tape and also being lean enough that team members can just get down to work and do work. Because there was a period there where, you know, we probably had too much process and a little bit too much red tape. And then people get stuck in doing things a certain way and because the team members might not feel confident to speak up or break status quo or we've always done it this way or we're not going to question is that the most efficient way to do it? You can end up just doing tasks that aren't really adding value to the business. I hope you enjoyed that clip. Just a heads up, it was a snippet taken from the Business Systems Accelerator program which is the world's first training for systems champions to help you build a systems driven organization. If you'd like to find out more about the program, head over to systemology.com BSA and I'll see you in the next video.
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