Day-to-day management: some tips and best practices

February 23, 2021

Écrit par Solene Faure

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Today’s managers are facing many issues. They must must have an extraordinary adaptation capacity in order to be able to answer any situation (like a pandemic forcing everyone to work remotely). Managers must build a toolbox which will help them achieve their goals and lead them towards success. In this article, you will find 9 issues faced by managers and tools and methods to face them.

Issue #1: Communication

The most important issue within a team is communication. Its goal is to:

  • Broadcast a company’s strategic issues
  • Ensure strategic coherence within your team
  • Share messages linked to your own management and objectives
  • Communicate the right message at the right time
  • Renew the dialogue, which will favor proximity and collaboration

 

There can only be transformation with a global vision of your activities. That is why nowadays, communicating efficiently takes a new turn. With the development of remote working, everyone is kind of forced to find new tools to interact with their teammates. Then, you must succeed in making your interactions with your colleagues easier:

  • Put in place a collaborative communication. For instance, in Microsoft Teams or Slack, create dedicated communication channels for each project in which your co-workers will be able to exchange more rapidly in real time. In these channels, you will be able to create a shared space where everyone will find any documents linked to the project. Access to updated information will be facilitated for everybody.
  • Create meeting reports to verify everyone’s workload, sum up decisions that were taken and clearly formulate expectations
com informelle

Having formal meetings is an essential tool to manage communication with your teams. Regularly plan dedicated team meetings for your projects (whether they are face-to-face or remote). Furthermore, do individual meetings with your co-workers.

 

Informal communication is very important as well:

  • Take coffee machine breaks, even virtual ones, to interact daily about everything and anything and speak openly.
  • Use the lunch break to talk with the members of your team and get to know them better
  • Organize cocktail parties to encourage spontaneous communication and strengthen the bonds of your team.

Issue #2: Encouraging creativity

As a manager, encouraging creativity within your team will strengthen the general feeling of involvement. If everybody takes part in the elaboration of a project, team cohesion can only be strengthened. Stimulating everybody’s creativity will highlight innovation. You will break your team’s daily routine and encourage initiative and generation of new ideas. From this creativity will emerge a collective intelligence which will increase the team’s performance. Afterwards, you will be able to stand out more and find more effective answers to problems that may arise during your project.

To stimulate creativity, use brainstorming solutions:

  • Use mind mapping tools (Klaxoon.com)
  • Make word clouds (freewordcloudgenerator.com, wordclouds.com)
  • Share white boards on which everyone will be able to interact (Microsoft Whiteboard, Lucidpark.com, Mind Meister)
  • Install a suggestion box (physical or virtual with Diboks.com) for potential future projects
créativité en équipe

Issue #3: Prioritization and planification

 

To complete your projects, you should plan and prioritize your tasks. That will help you know which missions must be completed first depending on their level of priority or urgency. Having an optimal organization is essential for a manager in order to complete their project in time with their team.

Eisenhower matrix, Gantt’s diagram or Kanban, there are several methods which can help you. By clicking here, you can find all prioritization methods we have listed depending different ways of daily functionment. Those matrixes can be found in project management tools such as Beesy, Asana or Wrike/

Combine your organization and prioritization matrix with a to-do list with your calendar and you’ll become the king of organization! You will integrate all your tools with each other and will never loose useless time juggling between different platforms.

reporting quotidien

Issue #4: Reportings

 

Reporting tools are essentials to your everyday life. They help you manage your activities and help your take the right decisions.

Build your reports with your team and share them with your co-workers. Each individual must be able to access a 360° vision of your project in real time. Reporting tools should be used as a mean of motivation to your teams and not be perceived as a mean of constant watching.

 

Several types of reports exist. You can use:

  • Dedicated reports for each project to follow all your activities
  • A visual dashboard which will evaluate the general progression of your project
  • A checklist presenting all the tasks that were created and to whom each one of them was assigned as well as their deadline
be an active listener

Issue #5: Taking care and being attentive of your team

To have a performing and motivated team, you should take care of it. Be attentive to your employees. To improve everyone’s professional life, you should know their opinion, their thoughts.

To create a mutual trust bound and develop well-being at work you can:

  • Regularly create feedback forms on your management style, your organization or the general atmosphere (Google Forms).
  • Set up recurring one-to-one meetings with each person.
  • Create opinion polls (SurveyMonkey)
  • Each week, clear time in your schedule in order to be available. Your co-workers should be able to get ea to share their problems and opinions.
  • Regularly plan individual or collective meetings to prevent any conflict. Everyone can than express themselves on subjects they would like to address, but also their issues and sources of stress, etc.

Issue #6: Motivation

 

For your team to keep an optimal performance, it is important to maximize your troops’ motivation. Someone who is motivated will be more efficient and quicker with its work. In their eyes, the project’s yield will become more important et they will want to complete their tasks the best they can. Then, it is important that your team participates in the making of the project to make sure that everyone is really involved in it. Here are tips that will help you manage and monitor the general atmosphere:

  • Make evaluation tables that will analyze the level of involvement of everyone based on individual accomplishments. They will allow you to adapt and optimize tasks assigned to each person. To find more, click here.
  • Assign the right task to the right person who has the right skills for it and who will know how to efficiently solve this problem.
  • Have an overview of everyone’s different skills and assigned tasks in order to avoid work overload.
  • During your individual meetings, take time to speak with everyone to measure everyone’s sentiment. Then, you will be able to easily identify risks and problems as well as potential drops in motivation.
motiver son équipe

Issue #7: Team Cohesion

With a good team cohesion, you will increase your ability to go faster and further. With the right team spirit, you will be able to lift mountains. That is why your teammates should get to know each other and trust each other. By knowing each person’s domain of expertise, the members of your team will be able to assign tasks to each other depending on everyone’s skiils. Things will move faster and nobody will stay blocked on a specific mission anymore because of a lack of skill. Here are our tips to encourage team cohesion:

dynamique collaborative
  • Do team building exercises so that temmates get to know each other, develop a bound of trust and find out domain of expertise and skills of each other
  • Build a common vision. Give a direction to your team. To do that, regularly gather everyone so that each person can suggest and submit ideas. Then, you will be able to collectively validate decisions and build the same vision.
  • Define the values of your team with rules and bearings, which will improve cohesion team and coherence.
  • Use your company’s social media to make your co-workers interact with each other and create debates.
  • Organize best practices and tips sessions on common topics for everyone

Issue #8: Knowing how to empower your co-workers

 

As a manager, you are in charge of your project. However, you obviously cannot do everything. That is why it is important you delegate your tasks. Empower your team by assigning everyone important tasks. That will increase general involvement. Everyone will feel like they played their part in the project. To do that, define clear goals to make your teams independent. If everyone knows what they have to do, then each person will efficiently progress towards the common objective.

To help you, you can define SMART goals with your team. This method will help everyone better apprehend the project. Everyone will feel responsible for the achievement of the objectives.

Issue #9: Knowing your operating mode

We have now entered a new era: the era of collaborative and agile management. That means you should be able to adapt yourself to any situation, challenge or change that may arise. To do that, you should know your strengths, weaknesses and your points of attention in order to put them to good use.

différentes personnalités

Furthermore, within a team, each person has a different personality. Not everybody reacts the same way to a discussion. You should then find the right type of communication that suits everyone. For instance, you can:

 

  • Have your team take a personality test. This will determine each person’s ideal method of communication. With different generations meeting on the labor market, you may face difficulties handling intergenerational management. Click here to find out tips for a successful intergenerational management.
  • Identify the type of management that will be adapted to each person.

Discover beesy, the all-in-one solution that will meet your expectations:

  • A planning tool
  • A collaboration tool
  • A reporting tool…

…and much more! Project management will no longer hold any secrets for you.

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