Do you follow a structured workflow or an informal one?
Successful projects rely on relevant timely actions, based on business context. While few projects have shorter timelines, other projects have different timelines. When you have multiple projects going on across your teams, how do you shape these workflows? Do you have an informal one, where you focus on weekly meetings, long chain of emails, without activity updates?
Or, do you follow a structured one where you keep everyone on the same page? You make sure the vision is clear, the projects are divided into sub tasks & proper resource allocation has been made. You use appropriate tools to support, your workflow & make sure these tools make your team’s life easier & more productive.
When things are going here & there, when your team members don’t have accountability over tasks & you’re missing project deadlines, that’s when you should see it as a red point & start maintaining a structured workflow.
Let’s see what a typical structured workflow should have :
- Proper resource allocation by scheduling tasks
- Task prioritization through virtual assistance
- Data sharing on cloud (not the long chain of emails)
- Account management
- Transparent communication (channel wise teams)
- Defined timelines for each task
- Time tracker to improve the production, which would shed more lights on efficiency, reality of costs, estimations.
When your employees work on asynchronous schedules and you can’t focus on simply the ass-to-chair ratio, it forces you to evaluate productivity. And, productivity comes with lesser distractions, lesser use of multiple tools, lesser hence & forth communication and structured workflow.
Conclusion:
Ponder over which direction your team is going, introspect on the managerial level and see how can you make the best of your team, how can you structure work for them to make them more productive. One smart move would be to adopt a single work app which would synchronize your entire workflow.
