"Assumptions are the termites of relationships.”
-Henry Winkler
One problem:
Bad assumptions erode employee morale and team productivity.
One solution:
Use new software and management systems to: (1) clearly understand the true demands on your team’s time; and (2) facilitate regular conversations about how best to get everyone working on the right things at the right time.
Our thoughts in 500 words or less:
The transition to becoming a manager can be a baptism by fire and, all too often, a new manager’s team gets burned in the process. Many of us have experience with bad managers, and it's no surprise. There's often little training provided on how to successfully transition from being a corporate player to a coach, which leaves new managers scrambling to figure out what it takes to be effective. This lack of guidance can have a ripple effect, creating a culture of disengaged employees which ultimately hurts business. One common failure mode for managers involves operating with flawed assumptions about how team members spend their time.
How can a manager avoid this pitfall? To start, we suggest you get curious about how your employees actually spend their day. For example, one of our users, a CFO, was growing increasingly frustrated with what he perceived to be low productivity from a payables clerk who was spending weeks of time each month on a project that should only take her five hours. He used our software to conduct a time study of her work and discovered that, contrary to his assumptions, she was working quite hard on a variety of tasks like daily phone calls to suppliers and personally tracking down invoices, receipts, and approvals from other departments to get all the information required to complete her work. What our software revealed was a lot of broken processes in other parts of the organization that this person was fixing on her own each month.
This discovery led the CFO to shift his attitude from criticism to gratitude and he ultimately thanked her for illuminating a bunch of organizational failures that were not only slowing her down but also hurting relationships with key suppliers. These broken processes were assigned to an ops team to fix, the payables clerk started exceeding her performance goals, and overall finance team morale improved. Before assuming the worst, we would encourage you to get curious about how seemingly slow or unproductive employees are spending their time. Low productivity is more often the result of undocumented and broken business processes than laziness or incompetence.
Getting clarity on how your team is truly spending their time goes a long way to eliminating flawed assumptions that erode trust. When trust is low, effective communication suffers, resentment builds, and team morale suffers. In this context, it becomes nearly impossible for a manager to empower and motivate their team to achieve great results.
CuroWork can free managers from this trap by providing objective data to guide decision-making. With a clear picture of what everyone is working on, managers can:
Trust and verify: Empower employees and have data to facilitate performance discussions.
Quantify workloads: See who is busy and who has free capacity.
Set realistic goals: Base expectations on real-world data, not assumptions.
We’re here to help and have spent nearly two decades solving back-office problems. Our unique software tools will allow you to overcome the challenges of hybrid work and enable your back-office teams to thrive in today’s dynamic economy. If you are interested in discussing how to get your back-office teams to stop missing their performance goals and start exceeding them, please reach out to our founder, Daniel Paik, to learn more.
About CuroWork:
CuroWork was founded to build trusting teams by clearly aligning all work around the right things at the right time.
Comments