Stop wasting your time on team meetings. Asynchronous communication is one of the core principles why remote work is effective. 

A growing number of remote companies last year proved dozens of reports about remote work. Employee productivity increases during work from home. For example, Stanford’s research and Cisco’s study told the same.

Why?

Asynchronous communication.

In this article, we will talk about the most important things that make teams’ communication productive:

• What is asynchronous and synchronous communications
• Benefits of asynchronous meetings
• Why you should focus on asynchronous meetings (and should you do it?)
• When you should use synchronous communication (and why you can’t eliminate it)
• 3 steps how to run effective meetings 
• Examples of meetings for asynchronous and synchronous communication
• How to balance both types of communication: status meeting example

Seems a lot? Yeah, true. However, it’s a short guide on how to build communication in your team to increase productivity.

Let’s start with the basics.

What’s asynchronous communication?

Asynchronous communication is a way of communication when you don’t expect to get an immediate answer to your message. For example, email is asynchronous communication.

As opposite, synchronous communication is communication when the recipient is waiting for an immediate answer. The real-time meeting is an example of pure synchronous communication.

However, digital forms of communication might be synchronous too. For example, real-time answering in a messenger becomes synchronous. 

If you want to learn more about both types of communication, you can read our article What is Asynchronous Communication?

Benefits of asynchronous communication?

Better control of the time. As the result, employees are more happier and productive. Employees have almost full control over how to plan their day and schedule. Some of them prefer to work at night, others like to work in the morning. Also, it helps to find a better work-life balance because employees might spend mornings with their children and do work later.

Better quality of communication. Asynchronous communication is slower. However, many companies admit that the quality of communication is higher. People learn to discuss the topic without empty conversations. They have time to think about a question and give a deep and thoughtful answer. 

Better planning = less stress. People learn how to plan like a pro because now they can’t do everything at the last minute. They can’t send ASAP messages to co-workers because response takes time. It leads us to more effective scheduling to complete everything according to the plans. It reduces pressure and the job is done in a better way.

Deep work by default. It’s not necessary to jump on Slack or another communication tool to check messages each hour. Co-workers can check messages 1-3 times per day and get more time for focused work which increases productivity.  

Why should you focus on asynchronous communication?

The benefits of asynchronous meetings speak for themselves. Add to it the cost of synchronous communication and you will get the combo.

According to an article on Inc.com, more than $37 billion is spent on unproductive meetings every year! 

The cost of update meeting

The monthly cost of a weekly status update meeting for a team of 8 people is near $1k.

Duration: 30 minutes
Team: 8 people
Salaries: from $50k to $120k (1 – $50k, 1 -$60k, 3 – $70k, 2 – $90k, 1 – $120k)
The total cost of weekly meeting: $217
Total monthly cost: $868

It means that the cost of weekly update meetings for a team of 8 people is $10k per year. But let’s be honest, this meeting can go more than 30 minutes. 

It’s the main reason why you should eliminate the amount of real-time communication. Peter Arvai, a CEO and Co-founder Prezi, also tells that the async meetings will be the future of work.

Downsides of asynchronous communication

However, asynchronous communication is not ideal, and here are several downsides:

• Wait to respond
• Misunderstanding
• Not so emotional as real-time communication

It shows that you can’t remove sync communication in your process. However, you can balance these two types of communication to be more effective and reduce the amount of stress. 

3 steps how to run meetings in a better way

Step 1: Identify when to start async first

The first step is an understanding type of meetings that really important to keep in real-time mode. And what’s better to use in an asynchronous way. Here are recommendations from GitLab, which we completely agree on. It’s best to avoid real-time meetings for the following items:

• Status updates
• FYIs and process documentation
• Meeting about a meeting

Step 2: Set the agenda and talking points

If you don’t have agenda – you spend the company’s resources to empty meetings. “Jump on a quick call” without agenda might sound good for the participant but it’s counterproductive. 

Always set agenda and talking points that every participant understands the reason for the meeting.

All meetings must have an agenda and a documentarian, enabling everyone to contribute asynchronous regardless of time zone or availability.

Darren Murph, Head of Remote in Gitlab

At Focus, we realized that it’s not necessary to do each morning video standup call. It’s more efficient to run daily check-ins in an asynchronous way. Here is how it looks.

It takes few minutes to answer the main questions. For daily check-ins, you can ask the next items:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?
• Any blockers?

Step 3: To document takeaways 

If you run real-time meetings, don’t forget to document highlights after the meeting. If you do it in an asynchronous way, you have already documented it. Congrats!

The main point is to make takeaways after meeting to sync the team. It will help to be more accountable and productive in the next steps. Paul Axtell recommends doing these 2 things to recap meetings.

Examples of asynchronous and synchronous meetings.

Asynchronous meetings:

• Daily check-ins
• Weekly status updates
• Weekly announcements
• Monthly updates
• Quarterly team results recaps and celebrations
• Project sprints and milestones
• Backlog refinement
• New team member introduction
• Missed deliverable retrospective
• Alternate times for recurring scheduled meetings (for people who can’t attend synchronous meetings because of different timezones)

Synchronous meetings: 

• Sales calls
• Direct reports (1:1 meetings)
• Celebrations and retrospectives 
• First-time meetings with external parties
• First-time meetings with team members who have not previously worked together
• Difficult decisions for important topics (e.g. when stakes are high)

How to sync a team (daily check-ins case)

Let’s talk about specific use cases. 

How can the team use asynchronous daily standups to sync the team? There are 4 ways of running updates: 

Synchronous

1. Video calls. You can use Zoom, Google Meets, or another software. 

Pros:

• The main benefit of this way of updates is face-to-face communication. You get real-time statuses in the morning and then go back to work. 

Cons: 

• You don’t document your current statuses, which means that you don’t have a history of what you did last week. Don’t have history – you can’t analyze your productivity and find points for improvement. 
• You spend more time compare with async meetings. Everyone should wait until the end of the meeting. Compare it with async check-ins when everyone answers 3 questions (2-3 minutes) and reads the answers of coworkers. Usually, it takes few minutes because speed reading faster than speed talking.  
• Less quality of information compares with written updates.
• Not good for co-workers in different timezones

Asynchronous

2. Manually gather updates in Slack or any other messenger. 

Pros:

• Free
• You have written answers, which is much better than only conversations.
• High quality of answers

Cons:

• You should remind co-workers who haven’t sent an update
• Resources for managing it
• Don’t have analytics (only text answers)
• Still not good for different timezone because someone should manage this process

3. Special standup bot. It’s a bot that runs standups in Slack or MS Team.

Pros:

• Hight quality of answers 
• Written answers
• Integration with Slack and MS Teams
• Automate notification and reminders
• Have analytics
• Good for different timezones
• Reports

Cons:

• Using the whole tool only for this specific process

4. Team management pulse software Focus. 

Pros:

• Hight quality of answers 
• Written answers
• Integration with Slack
• Automate notification and reminders
• Have analytics
• Good for different timezones
• Connected with 1:1 meetings and goals
• Keep a history of goals’ progress and daily check-ins
• Connected with employee development plans
• Get feedback from employees
• Running all kind of async meetings
• Email reports

Cons:

• New tool (even if it’s simple)

Daily check-ins in Focus

How to balance both types of communication for daily check-ins?

Some teams don’t want to run async check-ins because they don’t want to lose personal communication. But status updates meeting is not designed for personal communication. 

How the hell should we run all meetings asynchronously now?

And you will be right – it’s not healthy to stop running synchronous meetings because of 3 main struggles of remote work: disconnecting, loneliness, and communication. You should keep using synchronous meetings but do it wisely.

Here is the better way of running asynchronous daily check-ins and team synchronous meetings:

1. You run daily check-ins asynchronously (choose one of three methods above you to prefer more)
2. And now you set group calls for solving key issues and questions if you want to keep the personal connection. Otherwise, you can use async communication even for solving problems. 

In this case, you don’t waste your valuable time gathering updates. You run asynchronous check-ins to gather this information. And now, you spend your time in synchronous meetings for making an important decision or solving problems. This is the most convenient and cost-effective way to run meetings in this case. 

Conclusion

Asynchronous communication still is not a common process for businesses. Many teams prefer to jump on a call to discuss their current statuses or sharing weekly announcements. It’s a legacy they have from the pre-COVID time when inefficiency was a frequent fact for many businesses.

I’m sure that more success will get companies that are ready to change and be more effective in processes. Teams that don’t require employees to be always in touch, allow asynchronous communication, increase the time of focused work. And create self-organized teams where employees are responsible for results. 

We are happy to invite you to this journey.

The post Asynchronous Communication: How To Run Meetings appeared first on Focus.

Asynchronous Communication is a key element for team productivity even if your team is not remote. Maybe you’ll be surprised – asynchronous communication is not only more effective but also helps people to complete the most important work and feel fulfillment. Let’s check how it works and how to build effective asynchronous communication.

Different studies show that productivity is not deterred by the shift to remote work. Why?

Let me tell you a short story. Meet John, who is a software developer in a tech company. He is a very nice guy who likes to help people. 

Right now, John tries to understand why Sylvia can’t export reports from their CRM. He is close to solving this issue…

At that moment, Ann is calling him.

John is a nice guy and loves to help other people. He postpones his job and answers the call: “Hey John, could you please help me change the button on the website…” Of course, he can. It doesn’t take a lot of time. A few minutes later, John solved this thing. Ann is happy. 

John is trying to remember what he worked on before the call. “Why we can’t export reports? Okay, let’s start from the beginning to find the reason for this problem.” 

Meanwhile, the team lead has created the new tasks for John recently. The to-do list is growing. John begins to feel nervous: “Why can’t I finish everything in a time-bound manner?” His anxiety becomes stronger. However, he is still a nice guy who likes to help other people. 

Suddenly Slack channel burst with dozens of messages. Users complain because they can’t log in to the system. Something wrong with their authentication. John is watching logs now to find out what happened and fix this problem. 

An hour later, everything is fixed. He is glad and wants to take a small break. But Monica is calling him at that moment. 

“Hi John, my client is tortured me. He wants to get more time for trying our product. Can you extend him a free plan for few days?” John is tired and without thinking accepted this request. He spends some time doing it. Also, he remembers that their tech side in pricing is not good and he should find the time to improve it. 

John gets back to the task manager and sees that he has 3 new tasks. And he still hasn’t solved the problem with reports export.

This is how it goes day after day. John often has to answer the same questions. And he still doesn’t have enough time to complete everything in a time-bound manner. 

He even read the book about time management to be more effective. However, the result is the same. He still doesn’t have enough time for effective time management. 

The end of the story. Sounds similar?

The real problem

This story is not about time management. It’s about effective communication. Communication might be 2 types:

• Asynchronous communication – when you send the message and don’t expect to get an immediate answer. Think about email. 
• Synchronous communication – real-time communication when you expect to get an answer at the same exact moment in time. 

Asynchronous communication examples

• Email
• Ticket in help desk system
• Project management tools: Basecamp, Asana, Trello, etc
• Messengers: Slack, Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc (the worst example for async communication because people still is waiting for a fast answer in the messenger)
• Focus (for status updates, stands, 1:1 meetings, etc)

Synchronous communication examples

• Live meetings
• Phone call
• Zoom, Skype, etc
• Messengers when you reply in real-time

Synchronous communications have several big downsides:

• Continuous distraction. Any brainwork requires high concentration and focus. There were a lot of researches on this topic – how much time do we need to get back to work after distraction. Numbers are different, but the result is the same. It takes a lot of time and our energy to get back to work and repair the previous level of productivity. 
• As the result, it increases stress. The person achieves less when teammates distract him/her during the workday. We spend more energy to make up for a lost time. Usually, it increases the level of stress. And it leads us to burnout.
• It takes a lot of time. Meetings are an expensive tool for a company. Especially, team meetings with 4 and more participants. 
• Priority on communication instead of focus on what matters the most. I often heard from people: “How can I turn off my phone, so people will not able to reach me?” However, if someone turns off a phone, people who REALLY want to reach the person will find the way how to do it. 
• Reducing the quality of conversations and answers. During a call or a meeting, sometimes you don’t have enough time to think deeply about the best answer. As there result, you make not the best solutions.

The benefits of asynchronous communication

Another way is asynchronous communication. And you get opposite results: 

• No distraction. Nobody calls you and you can do more focused work. Nobody distracts you during eating another “Pomodoro”. Increase productivity. You better plan the work. Reduce stress.
• Better answers. You can better formulate thoughts in the written mode. Also, it helps to document processes. John would like it.
• Communication is saved. You can think more before answer. As the result, you get better answers. And it’s written answers that you can use in FAQ then.
• Better goals. Asynchronous communication requires thinking twice and better formulate goals or tasks. 
• You can work from different time zones and it’s not necessary to be in the same place.  

Downsides of asynchronous communication

However, asynchronous communication is not ideal, and here are several downsides:

• Wait to respond
• Misunderstanding
• Not so emotional as real-time communication

It shows that you can’t remove sync communication in your process. However, you can balance these two types of communication to be more effective and reduce the amount of stress. 

How to balance both types of communication?

It’s hard to imagine how you can achieve your goals when everyone can distract you every time.  

On the other hand, asynchronous communication is respect for your time, plans, and focus. 

The right answer is balancing both types of communication. Avoid meetings and discussions that require much time. It’s important to identify topics that might wait and really urgent questions. For example, Hailley Griffis wrote how they communicate asynchronously at Buffer. And I agree with her:

Most things aren’t urgent. Knowing the difference between urgent and important communication is crucial.

Hailley Griffis

Anne-Laure Le Cunff recommends to document everything. If it’s not documented, it doesn’t exist. 

GitLab wrote Async 3.0, which is a great article about communication in their company. They share examples of asynchronous communication on GitLab teams. 

When to start asynchronous first

Our experience and GitLab shows that it’s crucial to avoid meetings and calls for the following events:

1. Status updates
2. FYIs and process documentation
3. Meeting about meeting
   

It’s better to use asynchronous communication. For example, you can gather daily check-ins instead of daily calls to align your team. In Focus, it takes only a few minutes to complete the form and see what’s going in your team.  

When to keep synchronous communication

At the same time, it’s clear that you can’t avoid sync communication. It allows building rapport faster and quickly delivers context to a group. Here are the main activities that it’s better to keep in a real-time way.

1. Sales calls
2. First-time meetings with external parties
3. First-time meetings with new team members
4. Important decisions (when stakes are high)
5. Supporting your direct reports (e.g. regular 1-on-1 meetings with documenting highlights of the meetings)

Tools for asynchronous communication

These tools we use to not distract each other in the team:

• Focus: for goal setting, daily check-ins, weekly updates, and 1-on-1s
• Github: to maintain the software
• Dropbox: for documents and files
• Google Docs: for documents and spreadsheets
• Slack: for urgent communication 
• Zoom: for video calls

It makes sense to say that we turn off notifications in most cases. Especially, in a messenger. You know, it’s hard to focus when you see the bunch of new messages in Slack.

Conclusion

We believe in the future of work in smart balance in asynchronous and synchronous communications. Use tools that increase transparency and avoid distraction. Set an emergency mechanism for how to connect in the case if you reduce the amount of real-time communication. And join Focus to try async check-ins, updates, and other forms of asynchronous communication. 

P.S. All names and events are fictitious. Any coincidences with characters and facts from real life are pure coincidences.

The post What is Asynchronous Communication? appeared first on Focus.

OKR, in general, and marketing OKR are pretty hot topics right now. A lot of companies talk about how important it is to set the right goals. However, setting OKRs is a challenge for many companies. What marketing OKRs should we set? What key results should we set for SEO and content marketing? And so on. 

We gathered the best practices for setting OKRs for marketing teams all in one place. In this article, you will find OKR examples for the main marketing areas: 

• High-level marketing OKRs
• Inbound marketing OKRs 
• Brand marketing OKRs
• Content marketing OKRs
• SEO OKRs
• Advertising OKRs (PPC marketing)
• SMM OKRs
• Product marketing OKRs

Before we start, here is a brief refresher about OKRs.

What is OKR?

OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a goal-setting framework that is used by high-performing companies like Google, Netflix, Twitter, and many others.

The main benefits of OKRs: focus on top priorities, alignment of the team, increase employee engagement, and connect strategy with tactics.

An objective is WHAT we want to achieve. It’s an ambitious goal, which motivates and inspires the team. 

Key results are metrics that track HOW we get to the objective. Are we in the timeframe? Should we increase the velocity or change the goal? Are we going in the right direction or are we losing the focus?

If you want to know more about OKRs, you can read this article on how to set powerful OKRs.

OKR example

Objective: Achieve record marketing metrics  
Key results:
– Boost the number of visitors from 10,000 to 20,000 
– Increase the number of signups from 1,000 to 2000
– Increase the visitor to lead conversion rate from 5% to 10%

Our favorite marketing OKR examples

High-Level Marketing OKR Examples

Objective: Achieve marketing record by the end Q3
Key results:
– Boost the number of visitors from 10,000 to 20,000 
– Increase the number of signups from 500 to 1,000 per month
– Increase the number of MQL (marketing qualified leads) from 50 to 100
– Keep customer acquisition cost of $20

Objective: Increase brand presence on the new market
Key results:
– Hire 1 local contractor for improving marketing materials
– Increase the monthly visitors from a new country from 500 to 1,000 
– Increase the number of leads from a new country from 5 to 25 per month

Inbound marketing OKR examples

Objective: Build a new inbound campaign
Key results:
– Increase monthly visitors from 25,000 to 50,000
– Increase DA score from 30 to 60
– Increase visitor to trial conversion rate from 3% to 10%

Objective: Boost Influencer Marketing
Key results:
– Get product reviews from 10 industry experts
– Run 5 webinars with leaders in the industry
– Increase influencer’s referral traffic from 2,000 to 4,000 per month

Objective: Increase conversion rate on the website
Key results:
– Run 20 split testing experiments on the website
– Increase the conversion rate on the main page from 5% to 10%
– Increase the average session duration from 2 minutes to 5 minutes

Objective: Create an amazing YouTube channel
Key results:
– Achieve 50,000 subscribers in Q2
– Get an average view duration per video at 10 minutes
– Achieve 100,000 hours of watch time on the channel
– Achieve 10% of Impressions Click-Through Rate
– Average 10,000 referral traffic from YouTube  

Objective: Build an industry-leading community
Key results:
– Achieve 5,000 members in the Slack community in Q2
– Achieve a 25% DAU (Daily Active Users)
– Achieve a 20% conversion rate from community member to paid customer

Brand marketing OKR examples

Objective: Boost the brand presence
Key results:
– Get published in the news about us in 3 mainstream media channels
– Run campaigns with top 3 industry influencers 
– Increase the number of followers on social media by 100%
– Increase the traffic from social media from 10,000 to 20,000

Objective: Create a leading industry brand
Key results:
– Get publications in top 10 industry media
– Speak as a partner in 10 industry conferences
– Get 50,000 visitors from industry-related keywords (organic)
– Increase the average brand mentions from 50 to 100 per month on the web

Objective: Improve brand communication
Key results:
– Boost the number of community members from 10,000 to 20,000
– Reduce the first response time from 1 hour to 10 minutes
– Increase customer satisfaction (CSAT) from 40% to 80%

Content marketing OKR examples

Objective: Create a content machine
Key results:
– Create a content strategy for the next quarter
– Choose top 5 writers regarding long-term partnerships
– Increase visitors from 5,000 to 10,000 per month
– Increase visitor to trial user conversion rate from 2% to 5%

Objective: Improve our content strategy and its distribution
Key results:
– Implement 10 new channels/blogs to post our content
– Increase the blog subscribers from 5,000 to 10,000 by the end of Q3
– Increase the referral traffic from 30,000 to 60,000 visitors per month

Objective: Make a great weekly newsletter
Key results:
– Create a content plan for the next quarter
– Achieve a 35% open rate
– Get 20,000 email subscribers

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) OKR examples

Objective: Increase SEO ranking
Key results:
– Increase domain authority (DA) from 50 to 70
– Increase the number of backlinks from 1,000 to 2,000
– Increase monthly organic traffic from 30,000 to 60,000
– Keep the visitor to lead (organic) conversion rate at 3%

Objective: Improve website engagement
Key results:
– Improve organic conversion rate from 3% to 6%
– Decrease organic bounce rate from 90% to 60%
– Increase the number of time visitors spend on the website from 2 minutes to 4 minutes

Objective: Become a significant player on Google search
Key results:
– Achieve a top-3 position on Google for 7 main keywords
– Decrease organic bounce rate from 90% to 60%
– Increase organic traffic for 3 main keywords from 20,000 to 60,000 per month

PPC marketing OKR examples

Objective: Increase ad campaign outcomes
Key results:
– Increase the average CTR of ad campaigns from 2% to 4%
– Reduce CPC (cost per click) from $3 to $1.5
– Increase conversion rate for paid traffic from 5% to 10%

SMM (Social Media Marketing) OKR examples

Objective: Be bold on social media
Key results:
– Increase followers on Twitter from 1,000 to 2,000
– Increase followers on Instagram from 5,000 to 10,000
– Increase leads from social media from 500 to 1,500 per month

Objective: Increase engagement on social media
Key results:
– Increase average shares from 50 to 100
– Increase average comments from 10 to 20
– Increase average clicks per post from 100 to 200
– Increase the traffic from social media from 5,000 to 10,000

Product Marketing OKR examples

Objective: Clarify our positioning
Key results:
– Run 40 customer development interviews to identify why they buy our product
– Get 1,000 responses on an online survey about our positioning
– Run team brainstorm session meeting to determine our positioning and messaging
– Run 30 customer interviews to validate the new positioning
– Achieve 30% sales conversion rate with the new positioning

Objective: Optimize marketing funnel
Key results:
– Run 20 user interviews with the target audience
– Increase visitor to trial conversion rate from 5% to 10%
– Increase trial to paid conversion from 15% to 40%

Summary

You can copy the examples or create your own based on these. By making your own OKR, you create goals that fit your needs much better. These current OKR examples help you to avoid the most popular OKRs mistakes that companies make. 

At Focus, we believe that using OKRs is the process of continuous improvements. OKRs can bring your team significant benefits like focusing on top priorities, alignment in your organization, synchronization, and much more. For using and tracking OKRs, you can use Focus. It allows teams to keep the focus on top priorities for daily operations. Start working smarter with Focus.

The post 21 Marketing OKR Examples appeared first on Focus.

What does an ideal team mean for you?

First, each team leader should clearly understand what the ‘ideal team’ means to him or her. How many people are in their ideal team? How do they communicate? How do people set their goals and evaluate them? How does a manager evaluate how employees are performing? How many regular meetings do they need to stay in sync? How does each employee fit with company culture and values? What’s important for the leader and what’s not so crucial? In what type of team does the manager want to work?

It’s hard to achieve and create the ideal team, but the goal of this practice is getting a vision for yourself. It helps the manager to make decisions in hard situations, when the leader will be able to compare current conditions with his or her ideal scenario. And as you know, difficult situations are not rare occurance the life of a company.

Ok, let’s think that you did it. You understand your ideal team and its criteria. Great! Now we’re going to consider best practices for improving management in the team.

1. Transparency

You know this trendy word. Transparency. It’s all about the new way of communication between the company and an employee. You know, people don’t like to be a small piece of the big bureaucratic machine. People don’t like to do a job when they don’t understand why should they do it. But a lot of companies maintain this kind of communication. 

95% of employees don’t know their company goals. 

Wait for a second, think about it. It means that only 5%, including the founders, understand what’s going on in the company and what it wants to achieve. How do you think this impacts employee engagement? Do your team members enjoy being people who don’t understand company goals?

Transparency is a way of communication with your employees when you don’t keep secrets from people about the main events in the company. It helps you to improve employee engagement and makes team members more outcomes-oriented. 

Share with them all the main goals and events in the company. Give them a total picture of how things are moving. 

What can you share with employees?

• Company’s goals
• Current status of the projects
• Issues and struggles that your company has at the moment
• Why they are doing what you ask them

This is only basic list of things that you can share with the team. Some companies go one step further and create a totally transparent culture by showing all information to employees, including profit and loss.

It’s not a necessary step. However, for reasons good, you should be transparent and deliver clearly values, goals, and causes happening in the company. 

Well, we’ve now identified one way we’re improving employees performance, nailed down how to communicate it to them, and made it super easy to get started. Now we just need to actually, you know… provide that improvement. What should you do tomorrow? 

First, you could start to do daily and weekly updates. They’re online meetings that allow your team to stay in sync each day. It helps to know what’s happening in your team, and build alignment between members with 5 minutes a day. To do daily and weekly updates, you can use Focus. 

2. Continuous performance management

Go further. The next crucial thing for building top engagement culture in the team is continuous performance management. Old school performance management is a once per year activity. It’s all about providing performance reviews once or twice a year and setting goals for the next one for each employee. It’s mechanics are useful, but it doesn’t always work well. The reason for that is New Years Syndrome. Say that you decided to go to the gym more next year, but when it happens, you start putting it off and then give up. Sounds familiar? Yeah, performance plans have the same pattern. Employees generally forget about their performance goals in their daily routine. 

Instead, aim to flexibly accommodate all the behavioural conditions and use continuous performance management. Continuous performance management (CPM) is a new approach for increasing employee engagement. The real value of CPM lies in the sustained improvement of the employees while providing them with ongoing feedback, recognition, and coaching. 

That way, you will be acting as their personal trainer – totally invested in their improvement, and working to make sure their personal goals align with company outcomes. The more you can get people to connect with CPM, the stronger their results become. 

So how do you implement CPM in your workflow and how does it work?

First, CPM consists of three main areas, like ongoing feedback, recognition, and personal meetings for coaching people. Ongoing feedback helps to keep your finger on the pulse of employees thoughts and mood. You’re able to figure out what’s going on right now with your employees and you are aware of what’s important. 

The real value of recognition lies in the sustained improvement of employees engagement. You probably aren’t saying “thank-you” nearly as much as you should be. But it really matters for people. 

And last but not least, CPM are personal meetings for coaching people. It’s called 1:1 session and, you know, it’s a crucial part of employees performance. Few managers do it in their regular workflow, but it’s vital in improving personal outcomes. The right structure of a 1:1 meeting helps to provide more personal encounters for both team management and the employee.

At Focus, we’re using our own software to do it correctly. All three parts of the CPM implemented in Focus help companies stay on the same page and build high-performing culture. 

3. Employee development

Employee development is a process when you, as a manager, help an employee to improve a person’s skills and gain new knowledge or skills. Today, employee development is an essential factor for employee retention. 

Generally, employee development consists of three main parts: 

• Plan
• Learning programs
• Feedback

i. Plan

The first step is creating a plan for personal growth. So what’re the individual goals of the employee? What’re the person interests? What does she or he want to achieve this year? What do they want to do? It’s time to be a personal trainer for your employees. You can get answers to these question in private conversations. 

Once you understand personal interests, you can go further and create an individual plan that includes goals, a realistic timeframe, and detailed roadmap of how he or she will achieve it. 

ii. Learning programs

Depending on what your employees say, you’ll find out key areas that they want to improve. Time for learning. It can be group training or personal courses, or both of it. The main point is to tailor your learning program to individual’s needs, but not on trend-led ideas.

iii. Feedback 

Building a system of regular employee feedback is a crucial piece of high-performing culture. When people perceive qualitative feedback from their manager, it’s practically impossible not to be engaged. In the exact same way, it makes sense for employees when they understand that their feedback about the job will be considered by the manager or the team. 

Ok, ok, that’s enough celebrating feedback for now. But how to implement feedback routine in the company workflow as smooth as possible? It’s the question that each manager should think about. It seems simple but don’t undervalue it. A rule like “you can tell me everything that you’re thinking about” generally doesn’t work well. Employees often have top priorities in their job that should be done. It means that an idea ‘to go and talk with the manager’ becomes top priority when something critical happens. I don’t think you want to wait that long.

In that way, you should implement the workflow feedback routines as general tasks. Another side of that, people don’t like fill reports and spend a lot of time writing it down. That’s why it should be as simple as possible. For example, we create lightweight check-ins at Focus that requires only five minutes per day. It’s several key questions about a person’s results for the last day, which an individual regularly receives in email or messenger. This approach doesn’t take a lot of time, helps to focus on the key results, and allows employees to get praise for their work. The last point is a treat for individuals because they like it when other people appreciate them. You can check here to find out more details about Focus. 

Conclusion

Team management is a challenge for managers and founders because communication with others has the potential for misunderstanding, especially when the company is growing. It impacts on team’s motivation when employees are starting to lose sight of the company’s goals and vision. Three best practices that improve performing culture:

• Transparency
• Continuous performance management 
• Employee development

Focus, is a continuous performance management platform, which helps companies build high-performing culture. We provide an easy to implement continuous feedback loop and create transparent outcome-oriented mechanics in your workflow. And best of all, it only takes 5 minutes per day for an employee to share their results and stay in sync with the team without meetings. It helps you to focus on what matters. 

How do you increase team engagement? Let us know in the comments below. 

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