Natural Entrepreneur: Managing Teams via E-mail

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Management

Managing Teams via E-mail

Use 360 degree e-mail to help manage teams and reduce time in meetings

Open communications between staff members within a company is essential to developing highly effective teams. But this doesn't necessarily mean conducting more meetings, which can become time consuming and inefficient. Here’s a simple way to use e-mail to help build good working relationships and teamwork.

It goes like this: Institute a structured 360-degree e-mail reporting procedure, where everyone is required to regularly report their status to everyone else on the team, including horizontally to colleagues, and vertically to direct-reports and managers.

I have worked with teams that have used this reporting regiment daily. At first, this frequency seems excessive, but it quickly becomes habit. Taking a few minutes at the end of each work day to write a summary status goes a long way toward keeping teams informed and engaged. If you miss a day or two that's OK too, but be sure to send one out at least once a week.

Larry Page, Co-founder of Google, implemented a similar process, and automated it,

“We did a simple thing that in retrospect was brilliant. We wrote a program that asks every engineer what they did every week. It sends them e-mail on Monday, and concatenates the e-mails together in a document that everyone can read. And it then sends that out to everyone and shames those who did not answer by putting them on the top of the list. It has run reliably every week since we started, so for every week of our company's history we have a record of what everyone did. It's good for performance reviews, and if you're joining a project team, in five minutes you can read what you team members did the last few weeks or months.” (from “How to Motivate Your Staff”, Business 2.0, December 2003)

Over the years, I have found the following e-mail format to be very effective and takes a minimum of time to create, update, and read. A nice thing about this format is that once adopted, team members only minimally modify the content to reflect the current status.

360-Degree E-mail Report Format:

Subject: Status - your name - date

Accomplishments/Tasks Completed:

Itemized list of things completed that day or since the last report.
These may be tasks both started and finished since the last report or those in progress weeks and now finally completed.
Meetings and important email communications since the last report.
It's OK for this list to be empty while all tasks are still in progress.
To do/Tasks In Process:
Itemized list of things that you will be starting and/or actively working on during the next few days.
If possible, provide an estimated completion date for each task and/or a % complete.
Important upcoming meetings, conference calls, e-mails, etc. may also be cited in this list.
Future Tasks:
Itemized list of tasks that you know you will need to work on next but do not plan to start immediately.
You do not need to include "everything" in this area, as there is likely an existing project schedule with the plan laid out.
Rather, this list will highlight those tasks you wish you could be working on now but have other things to finish up first.
Postponed/Tasks on Hold:
Itemized list of tasks that are In Process but you know will not be initiated within the next week, or are on hold for some reason.
A brief explanation might accompany items in this section, including any external dependencies which may be blocking your progress on the task.
Issues, Problems, Questions:
Itemized list of open issues, problems and questions pertaining to your project responsibilities. It is most important that you identify those issues that you have less control over and may require help or input from other team members.
Other Comments:
Perhaps list things like "I am taking Friday as a vacation day".

This 360-degree report provides transparency within the organization. Everyone can readily keep up to date on the status and accomplishments of co-workers. Obviously activities that should remain confidential, say between a worker and his or her manager need not be widely distributed. But generally, more communication is better, informing your colleagues where you’re spending your time and how things are coming along. Like a peer review, it provides checks and balances on priorities and work focus.

As a manager, you can keep track of what everyone is working on, even when out of town or tied up with your own priorities. For workers that need more management attention, you can keep tabs on their activity, providing additional feedback and adjusting priorities as needed. For more independent workers, staff members, and even high level executives, it’s a good way to keep an open communication and to account for their time.

This is not just a management and communication tool, but it helps individuals manage their own tasks and priorities. It provides a standard structure, especially valuable to those of us who may be more “organization challenged” than others. In addition, these days many folks use handheld computers (PDA’s) or other software to keep track of tasks and events; the status report can work very nicely in conjunction with these tools (perhaps the more clever of you will find ways to synchronize and automate the reports). In fact, for those who are quiet, shy, or generally heads-down workers, communicating their efforts and accomplishments will raise their self-confidence and self-esteem.

The meetings that you do have will be more efficient as a result of keeping these reports. Teammates will be largely briefed on each other’s status (assuming they’ve reviewed the reports beforehand). Rather than re-capping the background and history of a problem, focus can be on solving it.

It also works well with geographically dispersed teams, whether you're working with colleagues at various sites anywhere in the world, and/or team members who travel a lot.

This process also facilitates the escalation of critical problems before they become too 'hot'. A co-worker or manager can see if a task is stalled. And if a task needs higher priority, it will be noticed sooner, before delays jeopardize the whole project, impact other priorities, or affect customer relationships.

The risk of this whole scheme is, of course, keeping it going. There are several remedies to this problem.

First, it should be a required part of the job. Not keeping up should be noticed, or as at Google, you are shamed if you don’t participate. On the positive, your hard work and accomplishments will also get noticed.

Second, if the value of the process is appreciated, it won’t be considered busywork. For example, when managers and teammates respond to your report, with questions and comments, then it’s not just a one-way communication, and it has value to you and the company

Third, make it part of the company culture. If everyone does it, then everyone will do it. Recognize that it will help save time, by shortening meetings, yet keeps everyone informed.

While this 360-degree report may appear to be a micro-management tool, it really is not. The idea is it ensure that individuals are managing themselves, and communicating what they’re doing with the rest of the team.

No doubt there are other ways to accomplish similar results. Collaborative workgroup tools come to mind, for instance. One benefit of this 360-degree e-mail scheme: It's easy and incurs no new infrastructure or training costs.

-- Jonathan Linowes

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