Tag: Productivity

Categories
Managing Teams

Key training needs for remote teams 

By Akin Omojola

Once a benefit for only a select few, remote work is now an integral part of our professional fabric. Since the pandemic in 2020, about 49 percent of sub-Saharan African enterprises have retained a remote work culture in one form or another. This transformation ushers in training and learning needs that traditional office settings often do not require.  

Managing a remote team comes with its challenges, including ensuring that team members have the necessary soft and technical skills to thrive in a virtual environment. To achieve success in remote teams, you must identify, and address employee learning needs as stated below: 

  1. Effective Communication 

Remote teams convey their ideas and feedback via written and verbal communication. As such, team members should be coached on effective communication, email etiquette, project management/messaging platforms, and virtual meeting tools to avoid misinformation. 

Remote team members can empower themselves with courses on e-learning platforms or workshops focused on effective communication in a virtual environment. Beyond teams, organisations must also communicate clearly with all employees through regular news feeds, intranet chat lines, and online townhall sessions. 

  1. Time Management 

Remote work offers flexibility in terms of when and where team members work, but it also requires significant levels of self-discipline and time management skills. Team members must be able to prioritise tasks, set deadlines, and manage their time effectively to meet project goals and deadlines. 

To enhance time management skills, remote teams can utilise project management tools and calendars to organise their workload and track progress.  

Another key issue is meeting management. Organisations should adopt a single application for virtual meetings to avoid clashes and stick to meeting schedules as a corporate culture. 

  1. Technology Know-how 

Remote teams rely heavily on technology to communicate, collaborate, and complete tasks. As such, remote team members should be proficient in using a variety of digital tools and platforms to work effectively in a virtual setting. This includes familiarity with video conferencing software, project management tools, filesharing platforms, and other technology solutions that facilitate remote work. 

  1. Security 

Remote work comes with data security risks. New and modern frameworks should be adopted, and all employees should be aware that data security is their joint responsibility. Network hardening should be implemented since staff work from different local uncontrolled environments. Data loss protection (DLP) policies and technologies may be employed in addition to employee training. 

  1. Team Building 

Remote team members should build strong relationships, establish trust, communicate openly, and work effectively with colleagues from diverse backgrounds and locations. This can be done through regular meetings or check-ins to maintain connections and build rapport with colleagues, as well as virtual team-building activities like online games, group discussions, or collaborative projects.  

Team leads and human resources managers are also responsible for tracking engagement and mental stress among employees. Full remote organisations could sponsor physical hangouts periodically to foster a better corporate identity. 

Lastly, remote teams have unique learning needs that must be addressed to ensure their success in a virtual work environment. By investing in training and development opportunities/Platforms for remote teams, you can empower your employees to work effectively and collaboratively, regardless of their physical location.

Categories
Managing Teams

7 Tips for Effective Team Meetings

Have you ever led or been in a team meeting that went off track? Or does it stretches too long and boring that you slowly lost interest? Of course, we know that feeling!

Team meetings are a great way to engage colleagues, share ideas, and encourage creativity but this won’t happen if your meetings are badly structured or colleagues perceive them to be unnecessary and ineffective.

We’ve got the following tips to guide you and make your meetings rewarding:

1.      Plan Ahead – Keep your meeting on track

To avoid one-sided communication, you should share a brief or meeting agenda in advance with your team. Also, take note of important talk points, expected outcomes, and participants to attend, and choose the right time that suits every team member. This will help you evaluate the success of the meeting at the end.

2.     Adopt relevant technology

Technology is ever-evolving. You can now enjoy great collaboration tools that will help increase the efficiency of your meetings – send messages, share files, set up online calls and more. Here at SystemSpecs, we use collaboration tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google suites, GitHub, and more. You should try it out too.

3.     Be Time-conscious

When team members are late to meetings, it could result in unnecessary delays. There would be a need to recap and extend meetings to cover the agenda which will interfere with the meeting structure and possibly cause a ruckus. To avoid this, you need to set early attendance rules with reminders ahead of time to keep each member in check. Also, allocate time frames to the agenda outline for better time management.

4.     Ask Questions

Be intentional about your team’s participation. The meeting has to be valuable to everyone, so questions should be asked to encourage discussions and input. This way you’ll keep your team members actively interested and involved in the meeting and also confirm they understand the purpose and outcome of the meeting.

 5.     Set Ground Rules

This might seem too serious but it’s incredibly important to set ground rules that would keep your team members in check to avoid interference that could cause delay or generally any problems. Rules like: camera switched off if it isn’t a video call, mic muted when not speaking, phones silenced, meeting expectations, no interruptions, and others as they apply.

6.     Identify Meeting Patterns and Behaviours

If you’re going to change your old meeting patterns, you’ll need to observe your meeting patterns to observe what you think is wrong and also ask your team questions on what should be better improved to make the next meetings more effective. This will give you a better perspective on how the team feels and why they feel that way about your meetings.

7.      Improve Each Week and Do a Follow-up

This is a brief check-up that will boost your meetings every time. Less than being told what to do, people love to feel valued and that you care about their wellbeing. It’s not just about checking task completion but also building relationships with your team and checking in on how they are faring, and also how they are coping with their assigned task.

You can ask questions like: What worked and what didn’t? Was the last agenda accurate and helpful? Was there any information we could have shared in another way?

NOTE: Always test whether you need a meeting before setting up one. Once you have established that, you can decide how to use these tips to hold your best meetings ever. 

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Categories
Managing Processes

Errors To Avoid During Performance Appraisal

Performance appraisals have proven to be one of the best ways to improve employees’ productivity and enhance outcomes. This periodic evaluation of staff performance provides feedback on their strengths and weaknesses, enhances subsequent output, helps identify and reward high-performing members of staff, and determines appropriate salary upgrades.

Despite its numerous benefits, a lot of mistakes — sometimes known as rater errors — from a supervisor’s biased viewpoint can result in low morale, anxiety, poor job satisfaction, or even loss of job. It is therefore pertinent that supervisors, managers, and human resources personnel understand these biases and how to eliminate them during appraisal exercises.

These few points present some of the pitfalls that must be avoided and how to overcome them:

1. Central Tendency/Favoritism/Grouping

Challenge: The appraiser rates staff in a not-too-good or not-too-bad category. This is unfair to employees who really deserve a higher grading.

Solution: Establish and agree on SMARTKey Performance Index (KPI) at the beginning of the appraisal period and evaluate performance against these goals. Also, document observable behaviour over the entire performance cycle.

2. The Halo/Horns Effect

Challenge: Occurs when the appraiserallows specific positive or negative factors related to the employee’s work affect the overall assessment of performance.

Solution: Track and document performance based on agreed KPIs daily, weekly, monthly, bi-annually, or annually. Identify specific behavioural attributes that support your ratings and be sure that none is influenced because it is particularly admirable or irritating.

3. Bias/Comparison/Holding a Grudge

Challenge: This is when the appraiser makes an employee suffer for past behaviour, irrespective of the positive output at work or when the appraiser judges the employee based on factors like state of origin, gender, religion, age, disability, weight, height, marital status, etc.

Solution: Focus on the employee’s work, not on personal matters, unless those personal matters affect the work of the employee. Check your perceptions for accuracy, fairness, balance, and consistency.

4. Recency

Challenge: This occurs when an appraiser rates only recent performance, good or bad.

Solution: Keep track of performance and document observable behaviour over the entire performance cycle to get a balanced view. Ask others for their observations of the employee to see if they have different views.

5. The Sunflower Effect

Challenge: This is when an appraiser rates employees high regardless of performance, to make themselves look good or to be able to give more compensation.

Solution: Employees can justify ratings through tracked comments across set approval workflows for various levels.

6. First Impression Error

Challenge: This is the rater’s tendency to let their first impression of an employee’s performance carry too much weight in the evaluation of performance over an entire rating period.

Solution: Appraisals should support regular feedback, reports and trend analysis to help line managers and HR track employee’s rating over a period.

7. Concluding appraisals without feedback for improvement

Challenge: Employees do not get comprehensive feedback after the appraisal exercise.

Solution: Use an automated appraisal system that allows for feedback. Always provide unbiased feedback about employees’ strengths and weaknesses, and even suggest helpful measures to boost outcomes.

Appraisal errors can cause your entire performance review programme to lose credibility among your employees. Consistent analysis of the process can help avoid this situation!

With HumanManager, you can enjoy a seamless and efficient performance management process that suits interactions within your organisation among employees at all levels, as well as in the physical and virtual workspace. HumanManager makes it a lot easier to achieve your organisational goals.

Ready for a topnotch appraisal? Get started at www.humanmanager.net.