Cleaning your room was never fun but you have to admit it served the greater purpose of being able to easily find the things you need and, in the end, it made everything function better.
Keeping your team organized isn’t any different. Here are three tips about how to keep your team organized and better functioning as a whole.
1. Create A Shared Purpose
People, customers and employees included, want to feel like they are a part of something. They want to serve a purpose. They want to be valuable. Where purpose is good, shared purpose is better.
You want to people to be engaged with and participate in your purpose. You want to give them something to share with others and goals that they need to strive to meet. Creating a shared purpose will give your team a meaningful bottom line that won’t change. It’s a consistent reminder of what their goals should be and where their hard work should be headed.
If you don’t have a shared purpose, you can have confusion and inconsistency between your team’s members. However, a common cause can put all of your team members on the same page.
2. Share Information And Keep It Organized
As children we are all taught that sharing is important. Sure, our parents probably weren’t talking about sharing in relation to business practices but the core concept still applies. To help keep your team running smoothly, you need to get people to share information first.
If information isn’t shared well, employees won’t succeed at their job as well as they possibly could. If employees aren’t thriving in their role then neither is the business.
There are many ways to keep your information organized – such as charts, forms and procedural documentation. You need to make sure important information is recorded properly to avoid confusion and inaccurate details. Having a system where one or more people have access to crucial data can cut down on security risks and loss of business structure.
Having one location where you store all of your information can help keep you organized. Whether it is in a text document or stored online so more than one computer can access it, making it easy for your team to have access at any time should be a top priority. Continue to store your information in that one place to fulfill consistency and update it often. There’s no use in having that one place if you don’t continue to use it.
Just remember, no matter what you need to always back up your file. If something were to happen to your main source of information, you need to be able to recover what you already had.
Sharing information in an organized and effective manner can cut out time lost from getting new employees caught up while helping current employees do their best. Having a well-organized system that people understand and use makes everyone more efficient.
3. Create A Virtual Community
Sometimes you, as a manager, won’t be available. During these times, your team needs to be able to help itself.
In fact, they want to help themselves.
Most businesses now are a mix of in-house workers and remote workers. No matter what their geographic location may be, you need to have a place where everyone can meet and interact.
Building a virtual community can help spark communication, collaboration and equality.
Corralling all in-house and remote workers into regular video or web conferences can boost productivity and feelings of equality among your employees. Not to mention, it can strengthen communication between all employees.
These conferences can keep remote workers in the loop while helping them feel like they are still part the team despite their location. Virtual communities can also give more freedom to employees to rely upon themselves and create inter-dependent relationships.
If you are a remote manager, make sure you strengthen your virtual workplace by creating a feeling of equality, being clear in communications, and giving your team the room to work out problems for themselves. Trust, equality, and good communication will help any virtual community thrive.
Make being organized a top priority for you and your team or you could be losing time, quality work, and money.
What kind of advice can you share for people looking to keep their teams organized? Leave a comment below and let us know!
