4 Questions to Streamline Your Team
As teams expand and evolve, they demand more managerial energy. Creating a system for checks and balances helps ensure you’re spending your energy in the right places.
Allowing your attention to be directed in the wrong places quickly leads to overwhelm, inefficiencies, and goal shortfalls. Most of us have been there and all of us who have been there can say with absolute certainty that it is not fun. Overwhelming teams are plagued with wasted money, exhaustion, loss of confidence, and many other things that drown out our focus and passion.
To avoid this dark hole and keep your team (and energy) streamlined, get in the habit of asking four essential questions when embarking on new projects or tasks:
Does this relate to our company goals?
Hopefully, your team has annual or quarterly goals. Don’t let these goals just sit in a word document…refer back to them! In fact, refer to them often. Is what you’re doing now something that supports you or the team in accomplishing the goals you’ve already set?Do your clients (or internal customers) ultimately care about this?
Whether your ‘customer’ is external or internal, it’s essential to thoroughly understand the voice of your customer (VOC). Your VOC determines what your clients expect from the service you’re delivering. If the task doesn’t help you deliver a better service or find more clients to deliver the service to, then you don’t need to be doing it. Scratch it off the to-do list!Is there a better way to do this?
We all tend to overcomplicate things from time to time. It’s a natural effect of trying to make sure nothing falls through the cracks when we aren’t looking at the root cause of issues. Take a step back and evaluate if there’s an easier way to do a task or process. Can you automate the task in any way? Can you simplify it in any way? If you’re struggling to evaluate this yourself, then try booking a Productivity Analysis with us to help steer you in the right direction.
Can this be outsourced?
Oftentimes, there are tasks that team members take on that are not truly in their job description or their zone of genius. For example, communication teams often outsource graphic design needs. Sometimes there are tasks that are within an employee’s responsibilities, but it just eats away at their time, such as entering expense reports or booking travel. These are tasks that can be outsourced to virtual assistants (or in-house office managers) to alleviate stressfully long to-do lists from your team and allow them (and you) better time to focus on more important tasks.
Regularly implementing these 4 checks and balances questions will streamline your team to increase productivity and efficiency while reducing overwhelm.