You’ve mastered leading in-person teams. And then you mastered – or at least adapted to – leading remote teams. The latest update is that your department is moving to a hybrid team configuration – a combination of people working at home, in the office, in shifts, and/or around the globe. How do you keep this mix of folks feeling connected and moving forward when the configuration may differ day-to-day, week-to-week? These simple tools and practices used by healthcare and other 24/7/365 always-on industries may help.
- The Digital Assignment Board
In healthcare, the Assignment Board is a list showing which team members are assigned to which patient rooms, surgical suites, or responsibility areas. Staff members use The Board throughout the day to locate colleagues, adjust assignments as conditions change, and as a general situational awareness tool.
Adapting this tool – This tool is a simple grid you can use to display the information that will be most helpful to your team – assignment; location; time zone; shift; and/or any notes on availability. Post or distribute the grid through whatever channels your team already uses for day-to-day communication. You might choose to call it a Status Board or the Daily Task Map or whatever title best indicates its purpose for your team.
2. The Visible Schedule(s) or Project Plan
Schedules are nothing new. Any project manager worth their salt is continuously building and updating one or more schedules and sharing them in meetings. For variable and global work configurations, however, it’s important that the schedule be viewable by team members 24/7/365.
In healthcare, construction, and manufacturing, the schedules serve as the single source of “truth” around which all other activity is organized. There are staffing schedules, procedure schedules, training schedules, maintenance schedules, and project schedules. Having all of these fully available 24/7 enables team members to more effectively self-organize and adapt to unexpected events.
Depending on the tool you already use, you may simply need to enable “view only” access for all team members. If that’s not an option, posting or circulating a screen shot of the relevant portion of the schedule at the beginning of each week will serve the same purpose. If you are not already using a visual scheduling tool, you may want to start with a simple Gantt chart in Excel or the free version of any number of other project management tools.
3. The Daily/Weekly Huddle (aka Daily Standup)
The Huddle is exactly what it sounds like – a brief, synchronous (phone, Zoom, or in-person), full-team gathering to allow for real-time coordination. Depending upon the pace of change in your team’s work, you may hold the huddle daily or weekly. The Team Leader typically kicks off the Huddle with any schedule or budget updates, then each team member takes a turn saying what they are working on that day (or week) and any challenges they expect to encounter. If a person needs information or help to move forward, the plan for making that happen can be sorted out on the spot. The Huddle also helps to rapidly integrate new team members, especially if they were onboarded virtually. For a team of 15-30 people, the Huddle should take no more than 15-30 minutes and will save each team member at least an hour of information-seeking and rework.
If your team is distributed across shifts or around the globe, consider doing your Huddle at “shift change,” which may result in two or more Huddles/day. The Team Leader can attend both or a designated Point Person can communicate any necessary information between Huddles.
4. The Handoff Checklist
One of the biggest challenges of hybrid or global teams is that it’s impossible to get everyone in the same place at the same time. So there are handoffs. These may happen between shift workers in the same time zone or facility, or it may be between clusters distributed around the globe. Whatever the configuration, providing a standard structure for the information to be communicated from one person or shift to the next increases efficiency and decreases the likelihood of dropped balls.
For nurses, of course, the handoff walks through aspects of the patient’s care – vital signs, medications given/withheld, pain level, lab or scan results, procedure and discharge dates, etc., ending with a miscellaneous category of anything else the oncoming nurse needs to know to care effectively for the person. If you’ve been hospitalized, you know the quality of these handoffs can range from excellent to useless. Having a clear structure increases the likelihood of the handoff being excellent.
If your team is already working in shifts, they’ve probably developed their own methods of recording and relaying information using anything from spreadsheets to sticky notes on the lab hood. You can improve consistency and effectiveness by collaborating with them to develop a single checklist of the information to be covered.
5. The Patient (or Project) Record
In healthcare, the Patient Record serves as the single valid source of information about any specific person’s medical history and current medical encounter. Projects also need a single, organized information repository. The more distributed the project team (across time or distance), the more important the information repository.
Whether in healthcare or technology development, the historical part of the record becomes unwieldy. What makes such a record usable is having the information categorized, tagged, and searchable combined with a high-level navigation menu that makes it easy to move between categories (e.g., specifications; user research; customer feedback; financials).
While many companies do use Slack, Microsoft Teams, Sharepoint, or a shared drive, many others still rely primarily on email or are in transition between email and a shared repository. Exchanging documents via email too often results in wasted time and coordination breakdowns due to team members missing a specification or deadline update.
Hold on – Having a repository alone isn’t enough. You also need an agreed-upon organizing structure and use practices.
- DO make use of “Channels” (in Slack and Teams) or Folders (in Sharepoint or other shared drives) to categorize the information.
- DO take time at the beginning to define the purpose of each Channel or Folder. If using Folders, the first document in each folder can be Guidelines document (2-5 bullet points is sufficient).
- DO agree on labeling conventions and make use of labeling capabilities, such as hashtags (#specifications; #customerfeedback).
- DO request that every entry have at least one tag/hashtag to promote rapid retrieval.
- If using more than one repository, DO agree on which is to serve as the most up-to-date, accurate source of current status.
Over the course of the past year, you’ve probably created some tools and practices of your own to keep your team connected and functioning. If so, shoot me a note. I’m always expanding my toolbox.
