Speak to any team, and they will have many team members who tell you they are time-poor. Unable to complete all the activities they have scheduled for the day and failing to feel a sense of achievement for the day’s priorities.
Managing your time is not easy, but having a well-documented and embedded operating rhythm will help make you more productive and ensure each day, you are delivering the desired outcomes.
Here are 3 smart tips for leaders to optimise your team’s operating rhythm:
1. Identify the needs of your team
As an organisation scales, it also needs a reliable process. In a well-run, well-established organisation, the goals should be clear, and the work must be done in a predictable manner.
This leads to high performance and productivity of the whole company as well.
According to Jason Kilar (Hulu, Disney, Amazon), good processes are mechanisms that empower individuals and relieve stress in the workplace, and they should be widely accepted.
Most of the time, the operating rhythm gets neglected within the organisation. Even though it is an essential aspect of a company’s culture, it isn’t often a top priority unless something starts to go wrong.
Poorly conducted meetings, redundant processes, and so on are just some examples of a poor operating cadence. A common problem we have when creating team rituals and routines is that many employees in today’s organisations are hostile to the idea of processes.
But what if you already have a process in place, but they aren’t helping your company and just lessens your team’s productivity?
Then, that’s an issue.
So, how do you solve it? It starts with addressing two very simple questions: the what and the why.
The what refers to the actions you’ll take to achieve your goals, and the why is simply your purpose on why you want to achieve those goals. As leaders, we focus a lot on the what but fail to help team members understand the why. As Simon Sinek famously stated in his book ‘Start with the Why’, the why inspires others to take action.
To assist you in determining the faults with your operating rhythm, I’ve outlined three steps:
- Map out the needs of your team
- Sketch out how often they need to be met
- Identify the daily mechanisms required
It’s also essential to build rapport with your teams as part of this process so that you can work more effectively together.
You can begin sketching out the processes you’d like to put in place to understand what needs you must meet and how often they should occur.
2. Keep track of how your team spend their time.
Even though there are hundreds of articles and books on time management, most focus on the individual. For an entire team, it needs different thinking and strategy. This mindset and strategy will most likely help you develop an effective operating rhythm in your organisation.
But why is keeping track of your team’s activities so important?
It’s crucial to point out that a team that doesn’t know how to prioritise their tasks and doesn’t know how to manage their time will feel overwhelmed. In addition, various people in a team will also react to stress produced by poor time management in different ways, which cause conflict within the team and the organisation.
According to Vouchercloud, the average employee only works for 2 hours and 30 minutes every day. Also, Owl Labs research shows that more than 82% of managers are afraid that employees’ productivity and attention may suffer from working from home.
Better time management means workflow and inter-team relations will improve. Here are some benefits of it:
- enhances cooperation and collaboration
- relieves stress and tension
- informs everyone on the progress of a project
- keeps everyone up to date
Implementing effective time management does not just help your team work more quickly and effectively; it can also help them think more creatively.
Here’s how you can enhance your teams time management:
- Create a strategy and share it with your team.
- List down all the tasks your team needs to complete in small bite-size chunks.
- Create short sprints to focus on the completion of tasks
- Lessen impromptu meetings
- Propose effective time management tools to your team
Helping your team master these critical skills is the best approach to encourage them to work together to improve their time management.
When you use the correct combination of time management strategies and know-how your team spend their time at work, you’ll be able to increase the chance to create the perfect operating cadence for your team.
3. Find the right operating rhythm and make it consistent.
Operating rhythm is a powerful tool to embed habits and track what needs to be done daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
Now that you know the needs of your team and how they spend their time at work, you need to map out your operating rhythm to optimise your team’s productivity.
This will ensure the correct processes are implemented with the proper output and help individuals take responsibility for the entire process.
But where should you start?
Ellivate has learned over our combined 60 years of experience that implementing an efficient Operating Rhythm needs at least the following strategies:
- Redesign the organisation’s present set of critical meetings
- Establish roles and decision-making authority
- Inform your team of the importance of having productive dialogues
- Ensure that everyone is accountable in the entire process
- Make sure that the mechanics of the critical meetings are well-defined
- Utilise coaching to optimise the efficiency of your operating rhythm
- Document every process for evaluation
- Repeat the process to make it a routine
Once these strategies are implemented, you can deal with challenges in your company as they arise.
Make it a habit to think about how you might improve your team’s productivity while also removing any barriers. Because in every team, ambiguity is the enemy of development, so create a culture of decisiveness and consistency.
Download our Perform Through Productivity eBook to see examples of routines you could try in your organisation.
Ready to take your business to the next level?
I’m sure you’ve learned how to create an effective operational rhythm with these three strategies. By having a well-embedded operating rhythm, you will increase efficiency, productivity, and the effectiveness of team members. Habits are hard to form, but an operating rhythm can help team members and create accountability.
So, are you ready to take your business to the next level?
Have a FREE 30-minute session with me, and we’ll talk about how to take your business to the next level!
