Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
The perks of considering your plan “dead”. Dun dun dun!
How to get your team to stick to new habits.
Our Chief Happiness Officer stars in a Green Mango web interview.
Promoting yourself to your harshest critic.
Lessons from a productivity addict.
Take a break! It’s a productive pause!
Optimize your teamwork.
Sometimes the sheer clarity of hindsight is like life’s annoying way of saying, “I told you so!” Looking in the rearview mirror to see what went wrong is integral to learning from our mistakes, but we often wish for hindsight’s clear vision when we’re forging our way forward.
Research psychologist Gary Klein has a startling prescription for that feeling: imagine your plan’s death.
According to Klein, one way to tap into the power of hindsight is a practice called the premortem. In the more familiar postmortem, you analyze an unsuccessful event after it has occurred to figure out what went wrong.
In the premortem, the analysis faces the event head-on while presuming it has failed to generate plausible reasons for the failure. Performing premortems can help identify problems in advance and tune you into early warning signs because you know what to watch out for.
These are the basic steps for conducting a premortem:
There’s not much mystery behind how a distributed team works. We show up, in our respective locations, talk to each other, and make stuff happen. The alchemy of coming together to make it work is the same that any team experiences when they build something together. There are a lot of ingredients that go into that magic, and these days, people’s physical proximity to each other is not necessarily one of them.
Like many of the teams we serve, our own iDoneThis team is dispersed. While we experience both the challenges and benefits of the form, what stands out is how naturally that form compels teams to consider and resolve the process of daily collaboration. When we get down to it and count the ways we love distributed teams, we see the alignment of four elements — company culture, communication, productivity, and the right people — that help make the magic happen.
half of the magic-making iDoneThis team
As a manager, you need to know who’s wilting under the pace or workload… Ask people what they need, what resources would be helpful. And be a good role model… Give people permission to slow down.
Dr. David Posen, author of the forthcoming book, Is Work Killing You? A Doctor’s Prescription for Treating Workplace Stress in a Q&A with the WSJ At Work blog.
Dr. Posen breaks down three main causes of workplace stress: volume, velocity, and abuse. There are longer hours and faster paces in the modern workplace.
And then there’s the abuse:
Abuse is bullying, harassment, and all the politics people play. It’s amazing how one abusive person can create stress for dozens of people. It’s become a bigger problem because people have less freedom to say ‘I don’t want this job’ and go somewhere else. So people aren’t quitting and they’re not even complaining because they don’t want to seem like troublemakers.
Are breaks and reasonable hours enough to combat this type of workplace negativity? Dear readers, tell us about your experiences with what Posen calls workplace abuse or some ways to address abuse in organizations!
No customer service is an island. You just can’t deliver great customer care alone.
These days, customers are tech-savvy, creative, and communicative. Some customers may want to build extensions and plugins to your service. In fact, we owe many of our iDoneThis “goodies” to ingenious users who built them to better suit their workflow. Others request features or find ways to adapt your tool to their company culture that you never initially considered. Still other customers ask highly technical questions. They all use multiple channels to communicate a volley of varied issues.
The worst customer experience is to wait forever for an answer, only to receive a meaningless response. That’s bound to happen when you isolate your customer service team. Ill-equipped to substantively deal with issues, they leave customers hanging while running around asking developers for assistance.
The best customer experience is prompt, personal resolution of a problem, and this starts with a foundation of strong internal team connections and communication. The better your team is at communicating and supporting each other, the better the customer service results. Customer requests will have a faster turnaround, your responses will be more substantive and helpful, and your customers will simply be happier.
Here’s some key ways and tools to connect your team internally for excellent customer service:
Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
Don’t fall into the Vanity Work Trap – good for feeling awesome, bad for real progress.
Great humane productivity tips.
Learn how to ask better questions.
Here’s a sweet short film, Honk if You Love Someone, that will make you smile. (via Dan Pink, whose book, To Sell is Human, just cameout.) And now, catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
We’re among some pretty cool company in this amex open forum roundup of 10 amazing productivity apps.
Did you make any resolutions this year? Here’s why 88% of them fail and how to make them work.
Put just one word into action to refocus your company and motivate your employees.
Don’t wait! Delegate!
If you liked the film and want to make your own signs, try out some guerilla art using post-it notes! Bonus: not having to stand outside!
Crashlytics provides real-time crash reporting for mobile apps, down to the exact line of code that caused the crash. We chatted with Rich Paret, Director of Engineering, about how Crashlytics is leading the pack at an interesting stage of mobile development.
Current mobile performance management options run thin due to a knowledge gap that arises after somebody downloads an app. Rich recounts, “When [our] founders talked to developers about what they were doing to manage the quality of the stuff once it hit the app store, we found out that some software companies were paying an engineer to read the reviews in the app store. Any review that was under 3 stars, they would try to reverse-engineer from the reviewer’s comment what was wrong with the app. That’s a crazy sort of situation to be in.”
Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
We wrote about Peter Thiel’s unorthodox management philosophy of extreme focus.
How important company culture is to Zappos.
Using better “behavior design” to motivate, because why we are all basically still four years old.
Happiness is like a butterfly.
Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
How socially conscious startups find motivation.
Jeff Bezos’s peculiar management tool for self-discipline.
Are you happy at work? I believe you have my stapler…
A case for the workplace’s digital village.
The less-is-best approach to innovation is simpler and quieter. Ahhh.