Streamlining Workflows for Your Team

In my previous ecommerce management role at Shopee, I led a team of 50 productive and growing individuals. To lead such a large team, structurally, I had a team of 7 strong middle managers that helped me guide the overall group. As the lead, I took it as my responsibility to filter the group’s tasks, such that only meaningful work would be executed and time would not be wasted on unproductive labor. After I filtered their tasks, which often involved fighting against upper management, I equipped them with just enough knowledge so that they could stretch themselves and develop. Lastly, I tracked all projects at the level of the individual so I could understand if each person was working at an optimal level.

Background

Managers are typically hired to guide a team to produce meaningful outputs. These outputs can be higher sales, more hires, or more efficient algorithms and are assembled using a collection of tasks. Team members can execute the tasks provided to them, but how can managers allocate the appropriate amount of work to each individual team member to optimize between meaningful outputs, team member growth, and team member bandwidth. Success in these three areas will drive both company success and a positive team culture. Idle workers are an inefficient usage of resources, which will lead to a lower volume of meaningful outputs and a higher level of team member boredom. On the end, if we push too hard, our team members may be stretched too thin, potentially leading to more errors and greater levels of stress. In an ideal case, we would match each team member’s ability and ambition with the appropriate volume of work.

Streamlining workflows is the process to produce meaningful output while balancing team member growth and bandwidth. To execute the process, managers should filter tasks, equip knowledge, and create a ledger.

Filter Tasks

As a manager, there are two levels of filtering needed. The first is only saying yes to projects that will drive impact. If we do so correctly, we will deliver a better final output and save time for our team members. Our superiors, peers, and subordinates typically will attempt to provide more ideas in order to drive our key performance indicators (KPIs). Our job as managers is to filter through these ideas and select the ones that will produce the greatest impact while also considering the amount of effort required. If you are having trouble saying no to your boss / other people’s ideas, check out my article on Upwards Management.

The second level of filtering involves processing the tasks that we deemed as worthy to execute. We cannot simply receive a project and hand it off to our team members to execute without providing any additional input. Our value as managers is to process these projects before passing them to our team members, which will make the tasks more digestible. Processing projects means explaining the overall impact, breaking the objective into smaller steps, and creating a methodology with relevant guidelines.

In my previous role, upper management asked me to aggregate competitor market share numbers at an individual seller level. This is a vanity metric, a term mentioned by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup, which means having knowledge of this metric will not contribute to our actions. Regardless of the numbers… We will still build assortment. We will still have big campaigns. We will still look to win on prices. We will still target joint partnership opportunities. So my first filter was to say no to aggregating competitor market share numbers, which was successful for a few months. The second level filter involved streamlining the tasks I did approve. For example, in assortment building, I broke out missing items by sub-category and then had our team members target sellers to build assortment in each seller’s primary sub-category.

Equip Knowledge

Once we decide a task is worthy of passing down to our team, we cam further streamline our team’s efficacy by equipping the appropriate knowledge. This may include explaining the problem and objectives, providing the fundamental toolkit for problem solving, and/or mapping out the solution pathway. Let us dig deeper into each component, sorted by least specific on top to most specific on the bottom. To help give a concrete example, these four approaches will be discussed from the perspective of a recruiting manager speaking to a recruiting associate.

• Explaining Problem and Objectives: Explaining big picture surrounding problem, its constraints, and its overarching goals. This should be provided in every circumstance. Example: We want to hire two senior operations team leads to optimize our logistics by Q3 this year with a budget of X.
• Providing Fundamental Toolkit: Example: Providing specific methods, tools, or multiple choice options to solve for various components of the problem. Example: We can check see if their expected salary is in our budget by estimating their existing salary with Glassdoor.
• Mapping Solution Pathway: Mapping exact execution steps to solving the problem. Example: Schedule interviews with these five candidates.

The amount of knowledge we need to equip depends on the developmental state of our team members. Ideally, the team member receives just enough information such that they are still stretched mentally, providing them the opportunity to grow. We may need to map out the solution pathway for new hires, whereas experienced team members may only need to understand the problem and objectives. If we are not sure where they stand, we can break off smaller pieces and check-in more regularly. During these check-ins, if a team member is lost or behind schedule, we can equip more knowledge. Over time, the check-ins can occur at larger time intervals and the appropriate amount of equipped knowledge can be more precise. This is a cornerstone of mentoring. For a deeper look on this topic, check out my article on Mentoring Effectively.

In ecommerce, third party logistics providers can be difficult to manage. Just to name a few issues, there can be failed pickups, lost items, damaged items, failed deliveries, failed returns. Then each of these can have their own subset of reasons. For example failed pickups can be due to, but not limited to, not enough packaging material, seller not packing items on time, deliveryman not showing up, or a system syncing issue. Before I stepped in, these issues were tracked on an ad-hoc basis, so the scale of the problem was unknown. I decided to equip my team with a fundamental toolkit. I provided multiple choice options on a spreadsheet so that we could track and aggregate all issues which were then linked to our customer service staff processes. Therefore my team members simply needed to select an option in a central location as opposed to thinking about a novel solution each time a logistics issue arose. This equipped knowledge streamlined the workflow of all team members.

Create Ledger

Filtering tasks will ensure only the most meaningful work is executed. Equipping knowledge will provide just enough information for team members to personally develop while executing. Creating a ledger will allow us to monitor our team’s efforts, prioritize projects, and check-in at appropriate times. In this case, a ledger is simply a compilation of (1) all tasks, mapped to the (2) responsible person, (3) along with updates and (4) deadlines. Productivity software such as Asana, Monday, or SmartSheet was built exactly for this purpose. Personally, I built my own using google sheets with the four fields above () as columns.

After leaving a meeting, each team member should understand all tasks that need to get done, by what date, and how these tasks contribute to the overarching goal. In parallel, we, as managers, need to have a running list of tasks and check-in dates for each of our direct reports. During the check-ins specified on our ledgers, we should be gauging progress and providing guidance as needed. Furthermore, if we are behind schedule, re-prioritizing tasks and even removing some tasks for some individuals may be necessary. Alternatively, if our team members are doing well, we can ask them if they would like additional learning opportunities — the polite and subtle way of asking if they would like more work.

By creating a ledger, we gain a sense of each individual’s task, which can then be utilized to determine the correct moment to cascade tasks. Some individuals are strong planners and can balance multiple tasks well, while others may get overwhelmed if their list of activities is too long. As a manager, we need to have a feel for our team’s ability to juggle tasks. If they are easily overwhelmed, we should only give tasks once we want them to work on it. If they can balance well, tasks can be cascaded to them once we have finished filtering and equipping knowledge. There are times that our team members will get stuck and we will not be able to help them immediately. To ensure productivity remains high, our ledger for each team member should also have additional impactful side-tasks that can be conducted independently and in parallel with their main assignment when they hit a wall.

While at Shopee, I placed a high emphasis on retaining talent, which is linked to a positive team culture. To build a positive environment, each individual needs to receive the appropriate amount of mental strain. I regularly met with each team member to check if they wanted to continue to develop. These meetings also allowed me to gauge their stress levels and task juggling abilities. For the team members that expressed interest in stretching themselves, I gave them additional projects ranging from exploring providing appliance installation as a service to calculating the return on investment of online marketing. After providing these additional assignments, I tracked them in my ledger and checked-in with them at pre-determined intervals.

Closing Remarks
Managers produce outputs by streamlining and developing their teams.

I have filtered out tasks and only accepted a subset of my managers’ ideas. For those that I have approved, I processed the projects before cascading to my team. Then, I equipped my team with the appropriate amount of knowledge and tools to execute efficiently while also developing personally. Lastly, I created a ledger to track and optimize the productivity and development of my team. All of these practices have streamlined the workflow of my team, which has then resulted in the strongest sales performance among all categories in the company over my three year tenure.

Are there nuances that I missed? If you have any comments or questions, feel free to respond below or connect with me on LinkedIn. Follow me on medium.com/@dhuynh2979 for future articles on leadership and management.