How to call the day off with fulfilment
Until this pandemic shattered our work culture and transformed it completely to ‘work from home’ culture, we have been used to work only from office spaces. We had all our teams with us sitting around in clusters within a hand’s reach for follow ups and team meetings.
But the new normal requires most of us to sit somewhere in our little cocoon with ‘zoom’ walls separating us where only our ideas meet but not our hands. Most of us have also stopped showing our face in the video calls with the fear of ‘exposing’ the secrets by mistake. Adding to this mental monotony, the follow ups with our team and reviews have become a mammoth task. Even if they turn on the video, I have my team members who log in to the meetings with their background set in some movie theatre or McDonalds outlet. Shhh! I also did that during my circle meetings.
So, a question often used to come to my mind that how to have an effective review of the progress of a project which my team is currently pursuing even in this new normal? For this to happen, first of all we should not make our team escape these. It is the responsibility of the leaders to ensure your team does not dread the feeling of being dragged into a zoom room, instead they should be ready to open up their 100%. Then only an effective review can happen. When a review happens effectively and when you are sure that the progress of the project your team is working upon is satisfactory, you can leave your work with fulfilment. Otherwise, you will dream of your client yelling at you for shamelessly crossing the deadlines twice and proving how useless he is to trust your team with such a prestigious project.
There are some DOs & DONTs which we can follow to make this effective:
- Make the review to be point-to-point
Any team wants to work more and wants to be questioned less. So, make it a practice to keep your review point-to-point so that your team gets a tinge of what are the expectations and where they are in the way of satisfying it. Beating around the bushes will not make the snake come out and you will waste your time
2. Don’t expand the crowd
There is a common misconception that more human resources can increase the output. While this can be true, there are many chances that inefficiency creeps in when resources increase. So, leave this misconception that including more people can help in bringing more value to the discussion because it is not. Moreover, the person who is supposed to speak to you about the real progress of the work also will not open his mouth.
3. Keep up to the time schedule
Just be reminded of the fact that people are not now sitting in their office spaces and they can have some work scheduled after your meeting. There can be an opportunity for being flexible especially in the homes which entirely depends on your team member. Then it becomes important to leave the person on time which otherwise will frustrate them and make them averse to these kind of reviews
4. Don’t underestimate the environment
When you are in office you can think of only work as your environment motivates you to do the same. But while working from home a person is bound to submit himself to the environment where your family member expects some work from you in middle of your day. The same thing can happen to your team member. So, respect the environment and build some flexibility in the entire system.
Following the above etiquette of W.F.H culture can definitely go a long way in keeping your team motivated and interested to attend the reviews and getting awesome results as a team.
In all this activity, the most benefitted person will be you.
