Johnny Campbell advises managers to use tools like Trello and Monday to show who's doing what, measure output instead of hours worked, and trust teams working from disrupted homes. Accept flexible schedules and keep reporting simple.
Chapters
Okay, Part 2 structure, process and Expectations it's likely that any pre planned activities and projects that you roadmapped for months are now thrown into chaos and you and your team are in reaction mode, shoring up the company to weather through this crisis. The structure of knowing what we're doing and how to do it is actually comforting. It offers stability to people. But now this might be gone so you must re establish structure structure. I recommend that you use open collaborative tools for your working from home colleagues to offer transparency amongst your team as to who's doing what, where there are dependencies. Use agile tools like Trello Monday or other Kanban boards where it's clear who's doing what, what's still to be done and what's complete. These are transparent for everyone to check in on and know what all of my team members are doing. Set up a simple process whereby people clearly account for what work they're doing and make sure they keep the Kanban board up to date during this time. Getting tasks done can also be complicated because, let's face it, most of our team members will have something extra going on. For the vast majority of our team members, their kids are schooling from home or they have very young children who would normally have childminders and daycare, but maybe that has stopped as well. Youngsters crawling around and demanding to play on our laptop is hardly the productivity haven we'd imagined that working from home would be. Therefore, as a manager, you have to account for this in your expectations of work. My advice for you lead with trust. You employ adults. They will get their work done. It just mightn't be at the cadence or work hours that you're used to seeing from your team. Parents might get work done very early in the morning or while their kids are engaged in something for an hour or two without them. But for this transparency to be real, it means shifting from a focus on input to a focus on output. A great way to set the tone is to be accountable and honest yourself to your team. When you say you're going to do something, do it. While you probably can't communicate every single project you're working on with your team. If you can talk about maybe obstacles that you have or how your projects are progressing in an honest way, your team are likely to follow suit. Sam.
