Workload Maneuvers

Ok, so we’ve engaged our team and created some awareness around the current situation. Now we’re ready to start exploring and experimenting with options together.  If there isn’t enough work to keep everyone busy that’s a great opportunity for you to grow and build the impact of your team by taking on new initiatives.  In this module we’re going to focus on things to try when you are feeling stretched as a team.  So first let’s walk through 3 things that you could do with the work itself:  Accommodate, Eliminate, and Prioritize.

Accommodate.  The first option we’ll explore is accommodation of work, this is about taking advantage of scheduling and organizational rhythm to shift the timing of the work.  Ideally, we might not want projects to all launch or come due at the same time.  As you look at the regular rhythms of workloads, is there any work that could be shifted to a different time frame to help distribute the load.  The goal here isn’t necessarily that workloads to be equally distributed.  Having higher productivity seasons where we push hard, followed by lower productivity seasons when we can recover may be something you do intentionally, as long as we avoid extremes of having impossible break neck pushes that burn everyone out, or times when we’re just sitting around.  In your viewing guide you’ll find an exercise where you can roughly sketch out the fluctuation of your workloads over the course of the year.  This might be an enlightening exercise to have your team members do individually.  

Eliminate.  Can we simplify our workload at all by getting rid of some of the things we do? There are 2 ways to look at this.  First we can just ask, is there any work that we can just stop doing?  Can any of our processes be simplified or streamlined?  Secondly is there any work that could be eliminated by automation?  Are there any duplicatable processes that could be automated?  In other words, this isn’t something that someone has to do manually over and over.  Or maybe it is something that has to be done manually, but because we are doing it so many different ways and there’s not a clear process it just takes extra time.  So can we can refine the process, know exactly what the steps are, and make that an easier task that takes less time to accomplish? Really this is a process of looking at your workflows and looking at your procedures and just saying ‘are these the most effective way to do it?  Is there unnecessary work happening anywhere that we can just eliminate and simplify our process.  .

Prioritize. Probably one of the key things as a manager is the prioritize.  Prioritize. There are always going to be more key and important outcomes than you have resources to be able  on deliver. Which means you’re going to have to be identifying and keeping in front of you what are the priority outcomes so you can resource those things heavily.  By implication this also means there are important outcomes that you are NOT going to resource.  The hard part is people will always be screaming at you about the things not getting done, which is why it’s so important for you to know why you are not resourcing those things, because you have other key out right now that are more important. this is probably one of the biggest things you do as a manager is prioritize, say “these are the top three things right now.”  And recognize that these decisions are never perfect. Often you have incomplete information and you’re on a rushed timeline and you have to decide. You’re going to make imperfect choices and when you get the feedback that we need to shift priorities, that’s OK, don’t worry about what happened, move forward, reallocate resources. You’re doing the best you can with the information you have to make decisions and move things forward, but ultimately you will have to prioritize certain things and remove resources from other things.