The Science of Small Wins
Managing a remote team is about employee empowerment, not oversight.
Remote employees that excel are self-motivated, reliable and results-driven. As a manager, your job is to create a supportive environment that encourages employees to manage their own projects so you can focus on building a culture of trust and communication.
Here are seven things a remote leader must have to set their team up for success:
A few years ago you might have been scolded by your boss for goofing off at work. Nowadays smartphone usage seems to have become an accepted practice in the always-connected workplace. Whether it’s through two-factor authentication verification codes or JIRA SMS notifications, texts and push notifications have become a standard part of your workflow.
Even with the broadening acceptance of messaging and smartphone usage at work, the impact of this shift on one’s productivity is still unclear. Constant pings may offer essential info, or they can overwhelm you and reduce your efficiency. These outcomes surely differ by industry and personal preference, but it is up to you to figure out if this new notification paradigm is truly helping you get more done.
In this article we’ll examine how a notification-heavy workflow can impact and increase productivity, as well as learn about some of the most innovative implementations of text-improved workflows from platforms such as JIRA and RingCaptcha.
You come into work, thinking it’s going to be just another day in the office. You have a friendly chat about your weekend with the office manager while pouring yourself a hot cup of coffee. You make your way over to your desk, and just as you start looking through your email, a nervous employee pops their head in and asks for a minute of your time.
At this point, the next sentence comes as no surprise: “I’m giving my two-weeks notice.”
Job-hopping has become the norm. While fifty years ago, people held positions for ten or more years, today, workers only average about four years at each job. And the stigma associated with switching jobs has also decreased. Employees that spent less than a few years at a job used to be considered flighty—now they’re considered ambitious and ahead of the curve.
The odds are stacked against you, but all hope isn’t lost when it comes to employee retention.
While some clues will tip you off right away—such as too many “doctor’s” appointments, or employees coming in dressed suspiciously well—most of the time, the signs that your employees are job-hunting are considerably more discreet. If you learn how to pick up on these subtle cues, you can nip this problem in the bud and retain some of your most valuable employees.
Here’s how to spot when employees are looking for a new job (and what you can do about it).
If you run a location-independent business, you will run into a number of remote team communication challenges. When they arise, you might question whether or not the benefits of remote work actually outweigh the stress of unclear communication.
If you only knew how to avoid common communication pitfalls, you would be on the fast track to distance collaboration success. Here, that is exactly what you are going to learn.
Hashtags and @ mentions have created a renaissance in workplace communication.
They may have started out as fun tools to help us engage with others on social media, but they’ve changed how we collaborate across channels and even between teams. These tools empower employees to keep their communication transparent, and to collaborate better and smarter.
@ Readers: Here’s a brief history of the # hashtag and @ mention, and how they’ve become an integral part of how we collaborate.
Just like the poor souls on Hoarders, you may not realize you have a problem.
Think of all those little times in the day when you stop what you’re doing to ask “Emma, how does the copy machine work?” or “Bryan, how many days have you taken off this month?”
They seem like small-fry problems, but they are actually issues of employee empowerment. You stop, gather the information, and move on. But they all add up to a huge productivity drain for you and your company, for one single reason: knowledge hoarding. Information is stored in particular places, and particular people are responsible for it.
Knowledge hoarding is normal but dangerous. Here’s why:
A 2015 study at NYU Langone showed that when mice were given oxytocin—the hormone that enhances bonding—they started caring for other mices’ babies, as if they were their own. This behavior continued even after the mices’ oxytocin receptors were shut off.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could give some to your manager?
It turns out oxytocin can actually teach us a lot about working together as a team and building great work relationships leading to more trust in the workplace. Here’s how it works.
The more you write on your “Done List,” the less likely your co-workers are to read what you write. 81% of educated people don’t even read what they see—they skim.
I Done This 2.0 automatically sets the default length of a Done List post at about 12 words. We’ll never limit the amount of words you post, but the default setting encourages you to fit your post on one line, like this:
What do some of the most well-known companies today (Pinterest, Yelp, Box, POPSUGAR, Asana, MailChimp) have in common? They all care immensely about their brand experience. What else do they have in common? They all use a service called Envoy to extend that brand experience to their front desk, creating a warm, delightful and quick check-in process for visitors.
Envoy is a visitor registration platform that’s been a game-changer for how guests are greeted in workplaces around the world. As part of the sign-in process, they automate badge-printing, host notifications and signing of NDAs and other legal agreements. Founded in 2013, Envoy now serves 6 million visitors in over 50 different countries.
As we learned recently, the small team of 37 people was able to inspire team motivation through high morale and fast growth, thanks, in part, to their favorite productivity tool. Here’s how they use I Done This.
Naming every minute road block—and then taking the time to fix them—makes your team more efficient and helps with team productivity.
It sounds cumbersome, but resolving issues as they arise means faster problem-solving overall. Agile developers do this. They call road blocks “blockers,” and their teams grow revenue 37% faster, and their profits are 30% higher than non-agile teams.
Put simply, encountering blockers is great for teams. It’s a simple idea that any team can borrow from, but you need a process and tool to do it.
That’s why we’re adding “blockers” to our “done lists” here at I Done This. Putting all blockers in one place means that team leaders can help those who need it quickly. It also means that individuals can reflect on their own blockers, and see if they point to a greater issue that needs resolving.
All teams can benefit from using blockers to their advantage. Here’s what it can do for your team.
