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.

While speaking at many management conferences, I see that a lot of people struggle with setting OKRs (objectives and key results). The most important part I want to point out is that people often make similar OKR mistakes. 

In this article, you find the top 5 mistakes that companies make when setting OKRs and the ways on how to avoid them. If you follow these steps, you will save a lot of time for yourself and for your team in OKRs implementation. And of course, you will bring out the next level of creating an environment that values and emphasizes output.

Topics covered in this article:

• What is OKR?
• What are the obstacles that come with OKR?
• Top 5 OKR mistakes

Before we begin, I want to mention the main benefits of OKRs because it allows you to understand what you should be getting out of them. And no one can tell better about it than John Doerr, who worked with “The Father of OKR”, Andrew Grove. In his book “Measure what matters”, he describes four OKR superpowers:

• Superpower #1 — Focus and Commit to Priorities: High-performance organizations hone in on work that’s important, and are equally clear on what doesn’t matter. OKRs implore leaders to make hard choices. They’re a precision communication tool for departments, teams, and individual contributors. By dispelling confusion, OKRs give us the focus needed to win.
• Superpower #2 — Align and Connect for Teamwork: With OKR transparency, everyone’s goals—from the CEO down—are openly shared. Individuals link their objectives to the company’s game plan, identify cross-dependencies, and coordinate with other teams. By connecting each contributor to the organization’s success, top-down alignment brings meaning to work. By deepening people’s sense of ownership, bottom-up OKRs foster engagement, and innovation.
• Superpower #3 — Track for Accountability: OKRs are driven by data. They are animated by periodic check-ins, objective grading, and continuous reassessment—all in a spirit of no-judgment accountability. An endangered key result triggers action to get it back on track or to revise or replace it if warranted.
• Superpower #4 — Stretch for Amazing: OKRs motivate us to excel by doing more than we’d thought possible. By testing our limits and affording the freedom to fail, they release our most creative, ambitious selves.

Sounds good? Then let’s talk about the definition of Objectives and Key Results and what OKR mistakes teams often make using them.

What is an OKR?

OKR (Objective and Key Results) is a goal-setting method used by Google, Netflix, and many others. If you want to get a key difference between KPI and OKR then think about it as the difference between Waterfall methodology and Agile. I hope it helps ?

To clarify, OKR is a framework for setting ambitious goals that help a company focus on the most important issues. There are no hard commitments and bonuses for achievements. It also doesn’t impact the performance scores. In contrast, OKRs are ambitious, almost unachievable goals that continuously sync the progress.

OKR consists of 2 pieces: 

1. An objective is an ambitious goal, which motivates and inspires the team. It shows WHAT we should achieve.
2. Key results are metrics that measure 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 focus?

OKR principles 

It’s important to understand not only the shape but also OKR principles:

1. Publicity and transparency – everyone can see all OKRs. 
2. Ambitious – some OKRs should be at least 3-10 times higher than usual goals to motivate people on finding new and creative solutions. 
3. OKRs don’t impact salary or bonuses – people will not set ambitious objectives if they know that they could lose their income.
4. Constant tracking – OKR syncing should be at least bi-weekly. However, running weekly updates is a much better way of tracking OKRs. It helps a team be aligned and change initiatives if it’s necessary. 
5. The fewer objectives and key results are better – it helps to focus on the top priorities and achieve the best outcome instead of trying to complete too many goals and get the worst traction. There should be no more than 5 key results for an objective. Less is more. Also, don’t create more than 5 objectives in a quarter. 
6. 50/50 or 60/40. OKR is not a top-down goal-setting system like KPI. The exec team sets 40-50% of OKRs and employees create the other goals. It’s the mix of top-down and bottom-up goals that generally settles at around half-and-half.
7. The OKR cycle is a quarter. OKRs set clear quarters, but you can change yearly OKRs if it’s necessary. Quarterly OKRs gives you a combination of agile and clarity. On one hand, you can react pretty rapidly to the market’s changes or customers’ demands. On the other hand, you have clarity of the top priorities for the next quarter. During some major forces, like the COVID-19 pandemic, some companies move to monthly cycles to change goals faster in times of ambiguity.
8. Key results are only metrics. Sometimes companies use indicators like reference points or tools for employee motivation. In OKRs, we use key results like coordinates in a GPS tracker. It’s only about the current status, not about motivation or bonuses. They help us keep the right of way, adjust the speed, and change the tactics. It’s crucial for a team because they show everyone where we are now and where we are heading. It allows a company to be a united team that can adapt to the environment and different contexts. 

We looked at what makes OKRs powerful and what to pay attention to. Now let’s move onto tackling OKR mistakes.

OKRs are hard, but making OKR mistakes are easy

Everything sounds great and makes sense, right? OKRs are great! Then why are you reading an article about avoiding OKR mistakes? When you’re first starting to implement OKRs in a company, problems usually arise. Someone doesn’t want to achieve objectives that don’t correlate to salary, others can’t make the right and ambitious objectives or set useful key results. There are many problems that a team runs into during the first OKR cycle and it is easy to run into these common OKR mistakes.

When a company thinks about using OKRs, they should know that the company’s culture will be changed – such as emotional maturity in the workplace, employee responsibility, communication with colleagues, and feedback skills.

The good news is about the timeframe. Goals can not be achieved in one night. What you can do is implement OKRs and transform your processes and skills sprint by sprint. And the most important thing to do is to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your company and to create the right OKRs strategy based on these insights. 

Instead of a heroic two weeks sprint of OKRs settings, it’s better to implement the new framework wisely with less speed, but more effective. This approach allows OKRs to live in organizations when a founder stops spending too much attention on it.

The best approach is to establish a cross-functional team that will be responsible for OKRs implementation. Usually, the consists of the board of directors and from five to ten leaders from the organization. People from this team should get training on OKRs to properly understand how they work. Afterward, the team makes a step-by-step plan on OKR implementation and starts working on it. It’s important now to avoid those OKR mistakes that hundreds of companies have made before you. Let’s check them out.

5 most common OKR mistakes

OKR mistake #1: Too ambitious or too simple OKRs

One OKR mistakes we see companies make often is where the objectives they set are either too complex or too simple. And we did the same in the first iteration of OKRs. We set the OKR ‘Triple our sales in the quarter‘. It was a pretty ambitious objective, however, we didn’t have appropriate resources at that time to fulfill this goal. At the end of the cycle, we were exhausted as we achieved an objective of less than 10%. 

At the same time, we see many cases when companies set simple OKRs like ‘’Create the new website”, which probably is not so ambitious and hard to do. 

You should try to avoid setting very simple or very hard objectives. How do you set an ambitious, but not impossible OKR? 

Answer these 2 questions:

1. Will we achieve X in 3 months in our usual mode? If we understand that it’s achievable then it’s a simple goal. If not then it looks ambitious and we ask the next question.
2. Will we achieve X in a year? If we feel that we might do it – it will be hard, but we could achieve it in a year, then it looks like a good candidate on OKRs for a quarter. If we understand that we won’t be able to achieve it in a year, then it’s most likely your setting an impossible OKRs. 

Setting the right OKRs is the skill that a team improves step by step from quarter to quarter. Your first OKRs should not be perfect, because trying to do something ideal from the first attempt can take a lot of time and it also directly affects your enthusiasm. Feel free to set good enough OKRs to start using it early and then run an analysis, which will improve your next goals. 

Bad OKR:

Objective: x10 revenue in the next quarter
Key results: 

• Increase traffic on the website from 10,000 up to 50,000
• Increase Visitor-to-Customer conversion rate from 1% to 2%
• Achieve $10,000,000 in revenue

Why is it not a good OKR? On one hand, it’s a pretty ambitious objective and should inspire team leaders. However, there are two issues in the objective. First, the objective is not necessarily a measurable goal. Numbers in the title don’t inspire people in the team because they can think that it’s just boosted indicators. Second, the objective is too ambitious and it’s unrealistic in most cases. Increase revenue up to 10 times in a quarter – do you and your team believe in it? It’s hard to do in a year for most companies. And it’s even more difficult to achieve in a quarter. If your team won’t believe it’s possible then they will delay initiatives because employees often have a lot of tasks to do.

How can we transform this OKR and make it better?

Strong OKR:

Objective: Achieve a sales record in the next quarter
Key results: 

• Increase traffic on the website from 10,000 up to 50,000
• Increase Visitor-to-Customer conversion rate from 1% to 2%
• Achieve $10,000,000 in revenue

Now, this OKR looks pretty ambitious and we aren’t using numbers in the objective, which is really good for motivation. It’s a significant, concrete, and action-oriented objective that inspires the team. 

OKR mistake #2: Too many key results or objectives

Another OKR mistake we see is creating too many key results or objectives. In this scenario, companies lose their focus using the framework that was designed to keep them focus. Less is better.

How can you determine if there are too many OKRs? John Doerr recommends using 3 to 5 key results for an objective. The less is more. We prefer using 3 key results in many cases and set 5 results only if we don’t have another way. 

Using too many key results leads to a loss of focus on the most important things because the team will be doing a lot of different stuff. That’s why it’s better to set three or four outcomes to the goal.

Also, teams have similar mistakes with objectives. Some departments have 5 or even more objectives in a quarter. It also brings your team down a level when you are doing so many different things and wasting your attention in different areas. 

How many objectives should a team have? 

Again, John Doerr recommends 5-7 objectives for a company. We suggest setting 1-3 objectives for each level of your organization. 

OKR mistake #3: Using only top-down OKRs

This mistake often is made by autocratic leaders who think that OKR is the same as KPI. They set top-down OKRs for all teams and then it doesn’t get significant outcomes because people don’t believe in these ambitious goals and don’t understand why they should achieve them if it doesn’t correlate with bonuses. As a result, leaders think that OKRs don’tt work. 

OKR is not an autocratic top-down goal methodology. It’s all about people participating in this process. Each team thinks about its OKRs. People begin to understand the company’s objectives and how they contribute to the total outcomes, what’s the value they give to the company by their day to day operations. 

It helps everyone to see the real value of his or her works. And this is the place where the magic happens. People understand the company’s goals and know how they contribute to it. They set ambitious OKRs for their teams or for themselves. It’s a game-changer for employee engagement. 

However, you will not achieve this by highly hierarchical top-down goals. These goals are not connected to people’s views and desires. They might think, “It looks that our management wants us to work hard for achieving these ambitious goals without paying bonuses for it.” Do you think that motivates people? Top-down autocratic goals don’t encourage people to do great.

That’s why it’s crucial to build a culture where top-down goals work with bottom-up objectives. C-Suites determine a company’s OKRs. It’s high-level objectives for the whole organization. At the same time, teams start a discussion about their visions. What value they will put on the table for achieving the company’s goals. In this process, department heads talk with their people to determine the best and the most ambitious goals for them. Afterward, teams present their OKRs to the C-level management and make it public after confirmation. 

You see, everyone participates in the goal-setting. It’s not just a management game. People in teams begin to take care of the objectives because they participated in its creation. If you use OKRs only top-down then change it as soon as possible and give your people the opportunities for participation in this process. 

OKR mistake #4: Don’t track progress regularly

OKR is not a silver bullet that works after they were identified. You can’t set OKRs and forget about them until the end of the cycle.  

People are used to tracking metrics and indicators in both ways – either it was requested or before bonus pay. In OKRs, you should do it regularly at least one time per two weeks. However, weekly updates work much better in most cases. In this case, OKRs fulfill their destination, which is to be the coordinates for your organization and link strategy with tactics. 

Let’s imagine that you are going on a journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles. You turn on the GPS navigator to check the status. If you know the road, then you don’t need a GPS navigator. However, it works only for well-known goals that you’ve already done before. But if you don’t know the route and you don’t look on the navigator then each turn in the road could lead you to the wrong place where you are moving further from your way each minute. 

That’s why it’s crucial to set the specific day on the week and do weekly (or bi-weekly) OKRs updates. 

It doesn’t take a lot of time to do weekly updates. It unites your team across top priorities, which is a very important benefit for everyone. 

How can you track OKRs weekly? 

• First, you should answer this simple question, “What’re your OKR achievements this week?”. If you didn’t do anything regarding OKRs, then ask yourself why not? You should analyze this issue and take action on how to improve it for next week.
• Second, see who worked on OKRs this week – what’s about your key results? Are they changed? What’s your current status now – are you on track, behind, or at risk? Write everything down that everyone understands total progress. Keep it transparent.
• Third, are there areas for improvement? What can you or your team improve on for next week? Did you achieve any planned outcomes this week? If so, you can probably set a more ambitious goal for the next week. If not, then what were the main blockers? What can you and your team improve in the next sprint?

See, magic is here. Everyone analyzes their OKRs outcomes weekly and gets insights from it. Your team starts thinking about OKRs each week, which means that you are thinking about what matters the most, constantly. It sounds simple, but it’s so powerful. 

You can track your OKRs in sheets or in special software like Focus. You need to begin building a habit of weekly retrospectives and creating a transparent culture that values and emphasizes output. Learn more about how to run short scrum meetings in the linked article.

OKR mistake #5: Using results that a team doesn’t know how to measure

Some companies create very ambitious key results like ‘Increase NPS up to 2 times.’ However, sometimes when asking them about what’s the current NPS (Net Promoter Score) you hear silence because they don’t know it. 

And how will these teams track their progress and achievements?

In the case of NPS, it’s pretty hard to measure the score in several days. You need time to implement it on websites, newsletters, and so on. Then you should receive the data from customers. It takes time. If you have an OKR with increasing NPS by 50% this quarter and you haven’t implemented an NPS system yet, then you might have some problems with it, because you’ll be spending one or two months just setting up an NPS and receiving your first batch of data. With each weekly update, you will say something like this, ‘We haven’t had data for measuring NPS yet’. That’s why it’s better to set a key result as ‘Implement an NPS system’ and track how many initiatives you will finish for this key result. For example, if implementing an NPS system consists of 30 to-dos and you close 27 that means that you complete this key result at 90%.

When setting a key result, you should think about how it’s measured. Also, remember that they are indicators. Key results should tell a team about progress, so everyone can adjust his or her goals, accordingly.

OKR checklist

Phew, those are some big OKR mistakes, right? We gathered the most popular OKR mistakes in this article. However, it’s not all the mistakes companies make during OKRs implementation. That’s why I’d like to finish the article with a check-list that helps you to improve your OKRs. If you want to know more about OKRs, you can read this article on how to set powerful OKRs.

Check that your objectives fit these criteria:

• Objectives have a quarter cycle
• The objective is WHAT we want to achieve
• The objective helps to achieve high-level goals or other teams get value by achieving that objective
• You have 2-5 objectives per team’s level 
• 50% or more objectives set bottom-up
• Goals are divided into two types: ambitious and operational

Check-list for key results:

• 50% or more key results set bottom-up
• Key results are measurable and clearly describe achievements of objectives (at least “done/not done”, but it’s better to avoid this version)
• Track progress each week (or, at least, bi-weekly)

Summary

We looked at what makes a good OKR, what challenges you can face in your organization, and what common OKR mistakes to avoid. I hope they will help you in setting the right OKRs that will bring your team to the next level. And remember that the main mission of OKRs is to unite your company while making the focus on top priorities and transparent culture. 

Finally, I believe that identifying top priorities and consistent focus on it day-to-day is the best way for building high-performing teams. That’s why we created Focus, a tool that keeps teams on top priorities every day. Start working smarter with Focus.

The post 5 OKR Mistakes and How to Avoid Them appeared first on Focus.

As an entrepreneur or a manager, do you want to build an amazing team that achieves new heights in the business? 

Well, of course, you do… And I wanted the same. The real question is – how to manage the team and increase productivity?

This is the story about problems I had managing my previous startup and why I created the OKR Pulse platform, which gives new tools to better manage the team.

Several words about me

And before starting, I’d like to say several words about my experience. My career started in the Wildberries, which is the largest eCommerce company in Eastern Europe. Then I worked in the oil industry, where I was raised to the Head of a department role. It was a great and very useful period of time when I began to manage the team. At that time, I quickly realized that there are a lot of issues and misunderstandings in team management.

One step further, I exited from the job and created my first business, which was a marketing agency. I had created an amazing team in agency business that converted in Kepler Leads, which is a conversion optimization software. 

I was a pretty experienced entrepreneur, who struggled with the common manager’s problems.

Problems I had as a manager (and I’m not alone in these struggles)

Can you guess what it is?

It was an employee burnout. The employees lost their motivation and the team had a pretty hard time and low level of energy. And it’s a really common problem for people. According to a Gallup survey, 44% of employees reported feeling burned out sometimes. 

There are several reasons why it happens. However, our main problems were the unmanageable workload and the lack of clarity. Especially, people didn’t have a clear vision of why we did what we did. We also had many third side projects because of the lack of focus. We had so many goals that people were overwhelmed. 

Ha, you needed project management software

And, you know, we used project management software to structure all processes. We ran Scrum sprints to iterate quickly and be more effective. I mean we were a really prepared team that used great software and team management framework. 

However, it didn’t help us as much as I wanted. People were losing motivation and it directly impacted the total outcomes.

Our Trello boards were full of tasks and columns. 

See, when I was trying to improve performance, we documented everything to better deliver information about what people should do and all the company’s goals. It didn’t help. 

The real problem

The real problem was the lack of focus on the strategy. You know, sometimes we love to jump into tactics. What should we do today, how can we achieve this goal, and so on. And it was each day. 

I made separate columns on Trello for vision and strategic goals, but it didn’t work well. It was my fault as I should talk about strategy more. In reality, we had strategy goals on Trello, but people didn’t see the connection between those big strategic goals and their daily routines. In a few days after the strategy session, everything returned to the usual mode when we were thinking about new tasks, daily routines, and deadlines. Tactics, tactics, tactics.

It only increased employee burnout. 

How did we survive?

There was no magic button, but in one time we decided to use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) after researching how this goal-setting system has helped tech companies from Intel to Google.

OKRs are a method of setting objectives and tracking key results. It allows you to synchronize the team and focus on the most important things. You literally become to feel like the one team because everyone understands how she or he impacts on team and company’s goals.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

Objectives

“It’s like goals served in a fractal manner”

Eric, founder of Pebble

Objectives should be ambitious and inspire the team to achieve new heights. According to Google, objectives should not be achievable 100%. An OKR that was 70% accomplished is a great indicator of an objective. 

Tips for setting objectives:

• Choose from three to five objectives
• Lead to the new achievements
• The team should understand if a result was achieved or not

Key Results

Key results make OKRs more specific. It is specific metrics, which are based on objectives.

Tips for setting key results:

• Write three key results for each objective
• Choose specific key results, which show you achieve the goal
• It should be measurable 

One OKR example from Uber:

What about us?

We survived after OKRs setup. It helped us connect strategic goals (objectives) with tasks that everyone works daily (key results). Team members began to see the outcomes of their daily job. It also focused on the most important goals that we should achieve.

It was the breath of fresh air when the team understood the outcomes of the job. As I said before, OKR was not a magic button, because it took a decent time to implement them. Also, I started to run systematically 1-on-1 meetings with team members, which definitely gave another boost in team engagement. 

There was a mix of several things that helped us to survive and grow the business. However, OKRs played a significant role for us at that time. 

Why did I create OKR software?

We ran OKRs in Google Sheets and tried several OKR platforms, but nothing matched my expectations. Each of these options has pros and cons, but I didn’t find the solution I wanted. I had 2 main criteria for OKRs software:

1. Strategy: it should be easy to set OKRs that everyone understands what’s going on in the company in several clicks (design, dashboards, etc).
2. Tactics: it should push the team not only a strategic vision but also in weekly and daily execution.

OKRs in Google Sheets became too overwhelming because of the lack of opportunities in design. At one time, it stopped being comfortable looking for people’s OKRs in a spreadsheet with too much data.

Other OKRs platforms didn’t match my expectations because of tactics criteria. An OKR software usually has weekly cycles when the team updates their OKRs one time per week. It’s fine. However, I wanted to keep the team’s focus on OKRs not only each week but also each day. I wanted to achieve the best combination of strategy and tactics.

About Focus

That’s why we created Focus, which is the first OKR Pulse platform that gives all tools for managing the team on strategic and tactics layers. 

OKR Pulse = OKR (strategy) + Pulse (daily tactics)

The main concept is setting OKRs and keeping the focus on the main goals each day. Focus keeps teams on the most important outcomes instead of the heap of messages, emails, and endless meetings – focus on what matters the most. 

How does Focus work?

Step 1: Create OKRs

It’s pretty simple to do in Focus. Just identify your objective and key results for it. Everyone will see the company or team’s OKRs. 

By the way, there is a dashboard where you can pin you North Star Metric. It makes magic real when everyone in the company sees the team or company’s main objective or key results.

Step 2: Run Weekly Updates

It’s the showtime now. Each week, your team will get a notification to complete weekly updates, which helps to focus on the most important goals. 

Also, you should update the status of the OKRs you participate in. It allows everyone to see how their work impacts on company outcomes each week.

Step 3: Run Daily Standups

Here is the daily tactics activity, which is called daily standups. It’s short updates with 3 simple questions that align the team and show everyone what’s going on in the team. 

Questions for daily standup:

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

It takes only 5 minutes for team members to complete the standup. In contrast, long status report meetings that cost pretty much for the business if you calculate the time, which employees waste on it. 

Daily standups allow synchronizing the team with OKRs in daily operations. 

Conclusion

That’s it. I shared my story about why I created Focus and why I believe that it’s crucial for a company to build a healthy environment, which helps people to focus on what matters. 

OKRs system is really useful if you find out the right objectives for your organization. It aligns the team and brings team performance to the next level.

You can try Focus for using OKRs and running daily and weekly updates. This mix of strategy and tactics is a very powerful toolkit to not only set strategic objectives but also align the team each day and keeps focus on what really matters. 

The post Founder’s story: Why did I create the OKR software? appeared first on Focus.

Who is a scrum master?

Scrum master is one of the underestimated roles in Scrum and Agile. A lot of teams combine a scrum master role with other roles like a developer or a Q&A engineer because they don’t know how to give to a scrum master a full-time job. 

It’s the most popular mistake in the scrum master role. Companies generally say, “We know that team members should create the product and work hard. We should help each other and be flexible. We also think that a product owner is a crucial member of the team because he defines the product vision and communicates with clients. What’s about a scrum master? What does he or she do?” 

In this scenario, a scrum master usually becomes a secretary, which is a very boring position, isn’t it? A scrum master moves cards on the scrum board and thinking about making coffee to the team while they create the product. Familiar situation? ?

Another popular mistake usually happens in enterprise companies when someone brings a scrum master role in the team and starts to combine his or her main job with scrum master activities. Companies, which decided to go to scrum, say, “We need to have a scrum master to implement scrum, right? But we can’t use a developer or Q&A engineer for that, because they should create the product.” In this case, a company chose a shy person who combines his main job with a scrum master role because he doesn’t have great skills in development.

Talking about it, Zuzana says that the strong scrum master is not considered as an optional role, who can’t add solid value to the project. The scrum master must be considered as a person who produces efficiency team growth. The goal of scrum master role is building not a good team, but building the high-performing team. In this case, the scrum master is the guy who has a very fast return on investments. 

Scrum master responsibilities

Let’s talk about scrum master responsibilities. There are many things that scrum master should do and all of them participate a lot in teamwork. If a scrum master combines several roles in the team, then each role should be separated from the main. A scrum master should choose only one role at a particular time. A scrum master, in contrast, who doesn’t separate his roles, can’t be good in all of his or her roles. 

Scrum master responsibilities include things such as: 

• Motivate the team to take responsibility and align each member across personal and team goals
• Provide transparency and partnerships
• Remove obstacles by encouraging the team to be proactive
• Understand agile and scrum mindset and be always learning
• Keep agile values and help other people to understand scrum values
• If it is necessary, protect the development team
• Help the team to be more effective
• Facilitate scrum meetings and standups

As you can see, a scrum master has a lot of responsibilities. However, it’s hard to compare with any traditional role and many people can’t understand what’s scrum master doing the whole day. 

Outstanding scrum masters should always improve their soft skills and be great listeners. Also, they should be experts in Agile and Scrum. The perfect scrum master has work experience in a scrum team. On the other hand, a scrum master will struggle with agile implementation in the company without this experience.

Scrum master goals 

What’s the main scrum master goal? It’s building a self-organizing team and produce self-organization as a key value of the company in all areas. Self-organization creates engagement, responsibilities, and make people more engaged. It helps the team to find its solutions and make the team more effective. Self-organization is a key indicator of a high-performing team in a long-term period, not in the short-term. It allows improving processes, communication, and partnership. Self-organization creates high-engaged employees and helps people to build a solid team with aligned goals and identity.  

If a scrum master focuses on other goals instead of building a self-organizing team, then he or she turns out to be secretaries, consultants, managers, or just not valuable team members who “doesn’t know what to do”. 

Remember

• Scrum master is not a secretary;
• Scrum master is not a ‘not necessary role’, but a person who creates a high-performing team;
• Scrum master is an agile and scrum expert who truly believe that agile and Scrum are ways to success.

About Focus

Focus is a teamwork software for scrum teams. Focus helps your company to run scrum meetings and stay in sync.

The post Great Scrum Master appeared first on Focus.

They’ve already achieved outstanding results in the area your organization operates. They are full of energy and tell anyone who will listen how awesome it is at work in your company. If you ask for working overtime, they do it – and happily. If you don’t, they unquestionably would if you did. They are the least likely to quit, and the most likely to pull others in your company. 

How did you do that? How did you create this team?

To answer those questions, let’s turn the clock way, way back — the time when the people were hired in your company. In this article, we talk about 5 crucial steps that help you to build a fantastic team.

1. Hire the best

You know, I don’t want to be captain obvious, but it’s easier to recruit the right candidates and give them all opportunities for achievements then hiring people whom you will be trying to motivate. The road from hundreds of resumes to your best employee is started with understanding the ‘right’ resume. 

Think about what’s really necessary for an individual to achieve the job’s goals. Define the job before hiring an employee. For example, persistence, listening skill, and learning ability often are more important for a sales manager than a degree from a cool university or work experience in your industry.

2. Company goals

To manage your team effectively, let’s try to do a little test. How many employees know your company goals? Just ask them about it. It’s crucial for team management that people know the main organization’s goals and understand how they participate in it.

Start asking employees about 1-3 main goals of your company. It gives a lot of insights into what people are thinking about the organization. Once you’ve understood all the opinions, keep going through the employee’s value. Show the individual how he or she impacts the company’s goals. It’s super important for people for getting value out of their job.  

Also, notice how different opinions you have now from your team members. Don’t forget to implement the workflow that helps you to make company goals transparent and show employees’ influence on it.

3. Personal goals

Alright! Now, that you’ve already built a transparent company’s goals in your workflow, let’s take the next step and create an outcome-driven culture. When approaching this, it’s really, really important to remember that employees do not want to devote their life to complete the company’s goals. They want to be passionate about what’re they working on and see their self-development. 

For that reason, your experience shouldn’t be defined by the milestones you create, but instead by the improvement of their life your company provides. Create individual development plans with employees that give your employees roadmap with measurable goals and timeframe for achieving these goals. You can read this article to get more information about individual development plans.

Take the time to get very clear on what kind of ‘better people’ your company makes. It will inform everything that follows from here, so it’s super important to get right. 

4. Communication

Communication often challenges for many teams. We receive a lot of new information in our email boxes and messengers. Everyone wants to get our attention in different ways. While you’re trying to avoid a lot of noise from various channels, it’s hard to build alignment across the teams.

You want your entire organization to be not only aligned around company goals but also has a workflow where everyone clearly understands each other. It’s hard, especially in that volume of communication. Many teams spend their time in the meetings to do their work better and build alignment. But you know that often meetings are not really productive. Regarding a Microsoft survey, an employee spends 27 hours per week for meetings. Wherein only 10% of employees called these meetings useful. People like to solve issues and make deals, but not discuss it.

When you design workflow for goals achievements, not discussing – it relieves a huge amount of employees’ energy and time. But how to set this kind of workflow, which reduces the time in meetings and synchronize the team? 

For each touchpoint, think about outcome-driven culture – what’s important to the company at that particular time? What the real goal of a meeting? In most cases, it’s planing, problem-solving, making decision, or synchronization with the team. And it ends with improving employees – the kind of people who can deal with all staff better than before that.

For most of these reasons, you can use a simple framework, which helps people understand what’s going and simplify communication between members. For example, you can use three questions to synchronize the team every day:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?
• What was the biggest obstacle?

You can use it in different cases either on short meetings aka standups or on online meetings via text. Also, you can set asynchronous conversation when everyone answers to the questions when it’s convenient for the person. It takes several minutes per day and helps to focus on the main goals. No long meetings – more time for work. You might even automate this process by using special bots or software like Focus that helps to run standups each day.

It’s only one piece of communication that you can implement in your workflow. Just start thinking about focusing on outcomes and simplifying current procedures. It gives you a lot of insights that the company’s processes, which were invented long ago, are not optimized for the current structure. 

5. Recognition

68% of companies who implemented an employee recognition system report a positive effect on employee engagement. At the same time, employees don’t feel recognized in most companies. There is a huge potential for managers on how you can increase employee engagement. Just implement a recognition system. To understand better how to do it correctly, we need to talk about common issues there.

The main problems with recognition are:

i. Wrong recognition

It’s kind of like a bad-suited jacket – you’re giving appreciation to the employee, but he or she doesn’t like it. For instance, a person can avoid public recognition because of a person’s modesty. Sometimes you can give appreciation either in the not right moment or situation. It’s a manager’s job to know the characteristics of each member of the team and understand how and when sharing appreciation. 

ii. Non-specific recognition

General “thank you” or “great job!” are good, but you know, it’s not the best way for appreciation. To get them, a significant recognition begins to be specific like “Thank you for your help with launching a new product, especially, with creating the awesome design in a short time.” Also, show them which value you recognize in their work.

How to implement a recognition system?

That’s why it’s crucial to implement a recognition system in the team that helps everyone to be specific and recognize co-workers at the right moment. You should understand the character of each employee in the team and the ways how they react to appreciation. The common practices for building recognition system correct are:

• Do recognition regularly
• Do public or private appreciation, depends on an employee character
• Do it online to write down this moment. It’s like a ’success diary’ with their achievements. It helps you to see the traction and motivates employees to reach the new accomplishments.

Sketchdeck says feedback is the key to navigation remote-waters and we agree 100%.

Conclusion

Building an amazing team is challenging for any founder or manager. There is no secret mechanic that you can use for creating a really powerful organization. It’s always about a combination of things where you should be the pro. To summarise crucial parts for team management: 

• Hire the best candidates
• Set clear company goals and ask your employees about its
• Create an employee development plan with personal goals
• Build a simple and outcome-oriented workflow in communication
• Implement employee recognition correctly

In Focus, we eat our own food while creating software that helps teams increase performance and build high-engaged culture. Our goal is to simplify workflow with transparent goals, clear communication, and employee recognition. In Focus, it’s easy to create a company and personal goals when everyone will be able to see how he or she impacts the company goals. In fact, managing a company is hard, and we want to make it better when everyone in a team gets benefits from that. 

Share in the comments below your experience on how to create an exceptional team. 

The post 5 Essential Steps to Building an Amazing Team 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. 

The post 3 Best Practices for Team Management appeared first on Focus.

Why employees hate their jobs?

There are many reasons why people don’t enjoy their jobs which impact on the final outcome. We consider three leading causes for teams where employees lose their motivation over time. However, there are lots of other core reasons why people don’t like their jobs. For example, an employee hasn’t found himself yet and isn’t an appropriate fit for the current position. Or perhaps a new worker doesn’t have the vital experience needed. We can also consider cases where employees work well in the early stages, but then they lose their motivation. Let’s try to figure out what’s going wrong.

Reason 1: They don’t know company goals

The first reason is about the company’s goals, particularly the employee’s understanding of them. I see many times when only a few employees in the company know the businesses goals. Research concludes that the majority of employees don’t understand them; in fact, they don’t understand why they do their job. Vital understanding of how goals impact on the business, what is of value and whats is not. How the worker can best align with company goals? They don’t know the answers to these questions.

So often, founders think that each employee clearly understands the company’s goals. A team leader can quickly communicate this through a 1:1 conversation with employees. Just ask people what the company goals are. It helps you to get the real status of employees’ vision.

To be specific why it matters, employees who doesn’t understand the company’s goals generally consider themselves as a small part of the system. In many cases, it impacts their level of motivation. It’s easy for anyone to lose a desire to work if he or she doesn’t understand their contribution and impact on the total results. 

Reason 2: Employees don’t get recognition

If you’ve had some recognition issues, you should know that it influences the whole team mood. Value of material motivation goes down by the time; in contrast, non-financial motivation means a lot for people. But managers often forget to give recognition to their employees.

Most articles and presentations about motivation focus on large things like a motivation program or corporate culture. It makes sense, but I want to underline that simple, basic things like recognition and qualitative feedback work pretty well. Yeah, it’s simple and gives superior outcomes, but often managers don’t do it. They have so many meetings and routines that they forget to provide feedback for their employees or colleagues.

Recommendations or some magical exercises don’t fix this situation because each manager knows what should he or she do. The only right decision in this area is implementing a feedback system every week. That is why we created Focus, which assists you in making employee recognition as simple and effective as possible. It allows team managers to be better leaders and helps employees receive consistent and well deserved feedback.

Reason 3: Absence of employee development system

Employee development is an essential process for improving motivation for long-standing team members. Routine jobs absorb many engaged team members. Each day repetitive tasks lead people to unmotivated behavior and drudgery. People generally don’t like it because it’s so boring. But we can’t replace people with robots for these routines jobs in many areas. Not yet.

That’s why it’s crucial to implement employee development. It improves people’s engagement and loyalty to the company. And I’m talking not only about training, but about constant practices for personal development every week. Managers should do a 1:1 meeting with employees to discuss their job and performance. 1:1 sessions help you improve employee engagement, not to mention, the opportunity to give quality feedback. Though weekly catchups you will know what’s important for your employees and what’s on their minds.

At Focus, we believe that people are the top priority for any company. Employees, clients, profit. These are vital factors for any business. And I believe that employees must come first because focus on your team helps to build a sustainable and long-term company. Focus on employees not only increases efficiency but also makes a great workplace for everyone in the company. It gives you as a manager superior outcomes in all cases.

How to increase employee engagement?

There are a lot of recommendations on how to improve employee engagement on the web like ‘how provide a beautiful environment, encourage flexibility, always be authentic’, and so on. It makes sense because it matters for people in all cases. But I want to talk about practical examples of what you could implement today.

Step 1: Measure current employee engagement

You should measure employee engagement regularly. It helps you investigate what’re your employees thinking about your company. And it’s an essential step for increasing engagement because if you can’t measure it how can you understand the outcomes of your improvements. One of the most reliable ways to do it is through Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), which is a survey to measure employee satisfaction.

eNPS is built around Net Promoter Score and has similar mechanics. You can find out different templates on the web or use eNPS module in Focus, which helps you understand what are employees thinking about your company. We provide anonymous eNPS survey to get honest feedback for improvements.

Step 2: Start doing daily and weekly standups

Unclear goals are one of the reasons why people lost their motivation. Create a workflow where everyone will be aligned with the company’s and colleagues’ goals. Simplify your teamwork without meetings, which often take a lot of time and distract productive employees. It doesn’t mean that meetings are a terrible habit for employees productivity, but it’s better to use modern tools and mechanics for team synchronization. For example, you can set daily and weekly updates in several minutes in Focus. Each event takes from one to five minutes per day for the employee, let alone that everyone will know what’s going on in the company.

Step 3: Improve employee development

To improve employee development, you should create the next two things:

• individual development plans,
• implement performance management.

Individual development plans give your employees roadmap with measurable goals and a timeframe for achieving these goals. People must have a clear vision of what should they do and what you, as a manager or founder, expect to see as outcomes of their work. Take time to discuss people goals and their development, which directly impacts on company success. Understanding performance metrics will help your employees to be more productive.

Another essential mechanic that every manager should do is one-on-one meetings with employees. Managers often don’t know what’s going on in an employee’s life. 1:1 session will help you to build reliable connections with employees and improve their engagement. It’s a profound topic of how to implement 1:1 meeting in the company, how to provide it with the best results, and which questions use in the meetings. We will consider this theme soon with more details.

Recap

Let’s recap some of the essential concepts to improve employee engagement.

1. Measure employee engagement

There’s only one thing that you need to benchmark your employee engagement against your own. If you can measure improvements to employees engagement over time, then you know you are working on it. To do that, we recommend providing eNPS survey at least one time in 6 months. How to provide eNPS survey? You could find a 3rd-party agency or use special software like Focus or an alternative. Check methodology and provider’s results, to be sure that it’s the best-suited option for you.

2. Set concrete performance goals

We recommend creating individual development plans and implementing performance management in your company. Also, managers should implement 1:1 meetings with employees weekly for improving performance in the company. 

3. Start doing daily and weekly updates 

Daily and weekly updates help your team stay in sync without meetings. It allows employees to understand their impact on total outcomes and keeps the whole team up to date with current projects. Remote employees are also able to stay in the loop easily and boosts feelings of inclusivity.

It’s hard to build a strong culture in a company, especially when the company begins to growth. It’s crucial for managers to use modern tools to organize their work and create a better work environment for employees. You can trial Focus for 14 days completely free to find out firsthand how effective project management software is for you and your team. At Focus, we help companies stay in sync without meetings and built a high performing culture.

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