Celebrating And Sharing Successes

If your new way of managing time is to appeal to – and work fairly for – everyone, it can’t be designed by a homogeneous few. It might feel harder, but it’ll get you to a better solution. Equally, this isn’t a time for telling people what the answer is but rather for letting people shape the answer. People need to ask questions, have their say, feel listened to and feel trusted. By giving them responsibility for designing the detail, they’re more likely to get onboard than dig their heels in or head for the door. In cognitive psychology, ‘levels of processing’ means that when we are more actively involved, we process that learning at a deeper level and it becomes more strongly encoded in our memory. So by trusting people to come up with the answers, you’re also building greater change capability. Call volumes were typically high on Mondays, with all the car crashes that had happened over the weekend. By Friday, things were pretty quiet. So the company asked the claims handlers, ‘How could you do this in a different way?’ They invited them to restructure their time so they could get all the work done without it overwhelming them provided they maintained or exceeded levels of customer service. Both customer service and morale went up. You can build in peer support by bringing different managers together to share problems and exchange learning.

The Emperor's New Clothes

If you want people to buy into a new way of working, your communications will need to speak to the head and heart, and take into account people’s differing preferences for the way they process information. You can do this by combining visual, written and aural updates that tell the personal stories as well as the facts. Assessing whether your efforts are paying off To help you assess your progress towards your goals and build wider confidence in your new approach to managing time, you’ll need an appropriate bundle of metrics. For your time strategy, you need a small number of leading and lagging indicators that will quickly and easily tell you how you’re doing. They should answer a few important questions, such as, ‘What are we seeing and hearing? What’s gaining traction and what’s not? To find this out, your metrics should be outcome focused, even if they’re slightly more challenging to measure. They’re likely to be a mix of specific business or organizational metrics and some metrics about the employee, client or external partners’ experience. Have any of your red or amber lights changed? Where are you seeing the progress? How do you hand over responsibility for continuously improving the way you manage working time? The core team doesn’t continue for ever, so who does this and how? Plus, the world doesn’t stay still so how do you keep your new way of managing time up to date and fit for purpose? You’ll discover how to celebrate and share successes and be introduced to a toolkit of resources to help you and your organization stay on track as you lead your business into the future. And we’ll take a look at some broader developments that could help us to transform our world of work on a far bigger scale. Different people will play important roles in promoting and reinforcing these new working practices and you can capitalize on early wins by publicizing and promoting their benefits. All these things will help you to embed your positive time practices firmly into your organization. Move on to other pressing matters? No – this isn’t a case of ‘fixed then done’. As the world evolves, the way you manage working time needs to keep pace.

Trouble No More

How do you actively maintain a growth mindset and make sure your approach to managing time remains fit for purpose? First, let’s look at how to make your own time strategy stick. You’ve tackled the headline changes and lined up the fleet forerunners – they are steaming ahead with gusto. Now you need to bring the rest of the fleet into line to help you achieve your goals – in other words, to reinforce your new way of managing time. If pay progression is based on time served instead of the value people have created for the business, you won’t incentivize more productive ways of working or eliminate an important barrier to equality in the workplace. You’ll also need to review your established leadership and management practices. How could you update your leadership behaviours and development programmes, and how you spend your time as a leadership team? Look carefully at ‘amateur’ managers:1 can you professionalize their managerial skills? They can call out unhelpful practices that squander people’s time or exclude certain individuals. By understanding their own biases and preferences, they can be more conscious of their personal impact on others. They speak up publicly, surface resistance when they encounter it and advocate on behalf of others. If your environment doesn’t encourage people to talk openly about these instances, people need a safe way of being heard. They can be a force for good by pushing their advisers and service providers to adopt ways of working that encourage diversity and promote cognitive and mental wellbeing. When you’re changing the way your organization operates and asking people to do things differently, positive reinforcements and rewards are vital to signal the momentum you’re gaining and build people’s confidence. Publicize progress via informal and formal channels, with leaders playing an influential role by sharing stories and anecdotes about these achievements.

Full Of Emptiness

Try a new way of resourcing and delivering a project that develops junior team members and frees up project leaders’ time to manage, not ‘do’. Gather positive client feedback and share this with the team and business leaders. Review how time was invested in recent competitive tenders and identify better ways of using this time to increase future successes. Invite different colleagues in turn to chair part or all of regular meetings. Share these during the recruitment process to show the variety of career paths available and explain how these new roles are enhancing profitability, retention and transfer of learning.