My new book Urgent! was published on 1st August. In this series of videos I am going to unpack some of the key strategies for moderating unproductive urgency.

In this video, Commit Fully When It Is Truly Urgent, I talk about the importance of committing fully in your response when a truly urgent issue or opportunity comes along.

One of the frequent challenges my clients who work remotely raise with me is that it feels harder to keep everyone in the team aligned on projects and other complex work when you are not seeing each other day-to-day. It is not the lack of formal meetings that is making this hard – we still have plenty of these, albeit via a screen. It is the informal chats and discussions that we used to have before meetings, or in the hallway, or around the coffee maker.

To keep everyone focused on the work that needs to be done in a project requires alignment across the team. When everyone is aligned on the purpose of the project, we are all clear about why we are doing it. When everyone is aligned on the outcomes, it is clear to all what needs to be achieved and what success would look like. When we are clear about who needs to be involved in a piece of work, we gain alignment on the stakeholders, thus making communication and stakeholder management more effective. And when we plan out what needs to be done, and update the status of work as we go, we create alignment on the activities and progress.

For many of you, this is project management 101, and no big news. And of course, the requirement to create alignment on these things is present whether you are working remotely or not. The current challenge though is creating alignment when you cannot come together around a whiteboard to get the team on the same page, or you cannot quickly grab a colleague to work through an issue.

I believe there are two key ingredients required to create alignment on project work in a remote situation – Visibility and Accountability.

Visibility

It is too hard to manage complex work if you cannot see it. If the work is buried in people’s inboxes, in files on SharePoint, or even worse, in their head, it is very hard to keep  track of what needs to be done, who is doing what, where you are up to, or what issues may need to be anticipated. That is why I firmly believe we need to learn how to leverage collaboration tools like MS Teams, Planner and OneNote. Along with MS Outlook, these are the tools that can make our work and progress visible across remote teams. I talked in more detail about this in a recent blog.

Accountability

There was much trepidation for many organisations before the pandemic about allowing staff to work from home. But COVID forced our hands and the result is that most organisations have successfully moved to a remote working model, or at least a mix of office and remote working. This has required trust from leadership, as well as from the staff themselves. Leaders need to trust that people will stay focused and productive, and staff need to trust that they will be allowed to do their work without being micromanaged. Teams that do this well have a healthy culture of accountability.

One of the tools that can help your team to build a more accountable culture is what we call Team Agreements. Not just a set of rules about how people should work that needs to be policed by management, but a set of agreed behaviours focused on how we will work and collaborate, which are created and policed by the team themselves.

Visibility and accountability are like two rails that keep us aligned and productive. Running through the centre like a backbone are the collaboration tools we use to create the visibility and accountability.

Does your team fully utilise the productivity and collaboration tools at your fingertips to stay aligned on projects and complex initiatives?

Have you made the time to discuss how you will work and collaborate remotely with your team?

Maybe you should – the productive alignment of your team could be at risk.

My new book Urgent! was published on 1st August. In this series of videos I am going to unpack some of the key strategies for moderating unproductive urgency.

In this video, Minimise Distraction When Interrupting Others, I cover how to interrupt others in a mindful and purposeful way to minimise unnecessary distractions.

In most situations, if I need something from you, I would prefer you to be responsive and take a week to deliver, rather than be reactive and take a day. That’s right, I would prefer that you took longer, but manage my expectations appropriately.

You see, one of the most important elements in our working relationship is trust. And I find it harder to trust reactive people. Reactive people jump on urgent (or seemingly urgent) issues straight away most of the time, but the nature of their reactive workstyle means that sometimes they drop the ball, and let things slip through the cracks.

They might react to emails the minute they come in but are also likely to forget about emails that they did not react to immediately. Others then need to chase them up, and suddenly they are in reactive mode again because now your request is urgent. In fact, I reckon this is why some people have a reactive approach to email. They worry that if they don’t deal with it straight away, they will forget. Lack of a good organising process should not be a reason to work reactively in my book (literally in my book, Urgent! which you can find in all good bookstores now).

Responsive people do not react to requests the minute they come in. They respond in a timely way and manage expectations. If they cannot deal with the request immediately, they acknowledge they have it in hand, and set an expectation about when they might be able to get back with a solution. This may mean you do not get an instant turnaround on your request, but you probably did not need that anyway. It does mean that you have peace of mind that the request is being dealt with by a trustworthy person.

In my early twenties I was always impressed by a few of the barmen in my local pub in Dublin. On a Friday or Saturday night the pub would be heaving with people, and the ten-metre-long bar could be six deep with merry punters trying to order drinks. An average barperson would keep their head down and just try to serve the person right in front of them. They would avoid eye contact at all costs. When this happened, people got a little feral and tried desperately to get to the front of the crowd to get noticed.

But there were a few barmen who really knew their stuff. Rather than look down to avoid eye contact, they looked up and caught the eye of the people in the queue. And with a simple nod, you knew you were on their radar. They did not serve you next, but you knew they would get to you in a fair and timely way. I reckon I would happily wait ten minutes after getting the nod without becoming frustrated.

This was a great example of professional people working under pressure but managing expectations really well. In our corporate workplaces, we can take a lesson from this. Our brand is on show all the time, and people will want to work with you if they can trust you. They will be more forgiving and open to negotiation if you are trustworthy.

So, if I ever need something from you, look up, give me a quick nod, and I will happily give you extra time to deliver what I need.

Smart Teams – Urgency Culture Online Session

If you and your team feel you are working in a reactive environment, and would like to explore some practical strategies that can help you to moderate the urgency and create a more proactive culture, let’s have a chat about how our

Smart Teams Urgency Culture session can help.

We run this 2-hour session online for groups of up to 25 participants as a part of our Smart Teams series. The session comes with an Urgency Playbook, and 10 team agreements that will start to shift your team culture from reactive to proactive.

Reach out to me personally at dermot.crowley@adaptproductivity.com.au if you would like to discuss how this practical online session could help your team in these challenging times.

My new book Urgent! was published on 1st August. In this series of videos I am going to unpack some of the key strategies for moderating unproductive urgency.

In this video, Be Responsive, Not Reactive, I cover not reacting mindlessly to incoming work, emails and communications.

I was running late for tennis doubles the other day, stuck in traffic and feeling mildly frustrated. I was going to call my mate Nick, but that felt like overkill as I was just a couple of minutes away, and I knew they could warm up without me.  A quick text would be better, but I was driving. What to do?

I had a brainwave! I wondered if Siri, the very helpful assistant on my iPhone, could send a text to Nick for me? I knew I could ask her to call Nick for me. Could she text as well? It turns out she could. I simply said, ‘Hey Siri, text Nick for me’. She asked me what I would like to text to him. I said, ‘Running 5 minutes late’. And away she went. So cool.

Now, this may not be news to you, but it was a revelation for me. There have been so many situations where I have been driving and needed to send a quick message to someone. And I would never take the risk of texting with my fingers whilst driving. Now, a text is only a ‘Hey Siri’ away for me.

This reminded me of why my team and I are so passionate about teaching people how to unlock the power of tools like MS Outlook and OneNote to boost their personal productivity. Our productivity tools put so many incredibly useful features at our fingertips, yet most of us have just never thought of using them to solve many specific productivity problems. Sometimes we are aware that these features exist, but we have just never linked them to a strategy that would be truly helpful to us.

The Siri text feature has probably been on my phone for several years. I knew that I could ask Siri to do other things for me. I had just never thought of asking if she could dictate a text message for me while I was driving.

Are you using tools like MS Outlook, and yet have never thought about how Outlook can help you manage your tasks and priorities, automatically delete or file informational emails, convert emails into actions, send useful information to OneNote notebooks, or manage email conversations to reduce noise? There is a whole universe of features under the bonnet of Outlook that most people never use.

These are the tools that we use all day, every day. But we need to take the time to explore them and work out how they can help us to be more effective. Never stop pushing your technology. Keep exploring to see what else it can do for you. And if you need help, ask us about one of our practical productivity workshops for you and your team. This will give you a fast start on what your technology can do to boost your productivity. Or ask Siri just like I did. You may be surprised with how clever she is.

Smart Teams – Urgency Culture Online Session

If you and your team feel you are working in a reactive environment, and would like to explore some practical strategies that can help you to moderate the urgency and create a more proactive culture, let’s have a chat about how our

Smart Teams Urgency Culture session can help.

We run this 2-hour session online for groups of up to 25 participants as a part of our Smart Teams series. The session comes with an Urgency Playbook, and 10 team agreements that will start to shift your team culture from reactive to proactive.

Reach out to me personally at
dermot.crowley@adaptproductivity.com.au if you would like to discuss how this practical online session could help your team in these challenging times.

My new book Urgent! was published on 1st August. In this series of videos I am going to unpack some of the key strategies for moderating unproductive urgency.

In this video, Use Appropriate Tools for Urgent Requests, I talk about avoiding using tools like email as the only way to communicate urgent requests.

My new book Urgent! was published on 1st August. In this series of videos I am going to unpack some of the key strategies for moderating unproductive urgency.

In this video, Don’t Always Expect Instant Service, I cover having reasonable expectations around deadlines with your team, colleagues and peers.

The office I work from has several apartments above it. The rubbish bins in the car park are the responsibility of the apartment tenants, who should put them out to be collected each week. Because the landlord also runs a retail shop from the building, which has its own industrial bins, there is some confusion about who is responsible for putting the bins out.

I recently walked past some of the shop staff who were complaining that the apartment bins had not been put out in over four weeks and were overflowing with stinky rubbish. I listened to their grievances politely but could tell that there was a problem here that may have been of the landlord’s own making. It seemed to me that he assumed the tenants would take responsibility for the bins, even though there was no culture of accountability in place.

Some teams have a great culture of accountability, where everyone takes responsibility for the outcomes that need to be achieved. Dan McCarthy describes a culture of accountability in this way:

‘A culture of accountability is an organisation of accountable employees. Results are communicated and understood by everybody. Accountability is determined proactively, before the fact, not reactively, after the fact. When a mistake is made, the response is not finger pointing and excuses – it is about solving the problem and learning from mistakes.’

How to build a culture of accountability – Dan McCarthy

I suspect in my landlord’s case he did not determine accountability before the fact. He assumed that the tenants would do the right thing and make sure the bins were put out. But in a situation where you do not have a strong culture of accountability, you may find that when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. Everyone assumes someone else will do it. Or in this case, that the landlord and his staff would do it.

Building a culture of accountability is especially critical if you want to manage unproductive urgency and reactivity in your workplace. If you do not proactively determine the accountabilities, the risk is that people assume that certain tasks are someone else’s responsibility, and mistakes get made. Things slip through the cracks, get forgotten or get left until the last minute. And this leads to what I call avoidable urgency, which I believe is one of the greatest causes of workplace stress and frustration. I talk about this in my new book Urgent! which you can find online and in good bookstores right now.

Now, do I expect my landlord to run workshops to build a culture of accountability with his group of tenants? No, of course not. But I reckon he would do well to acknowledge that one does not exist, and to put an explicit communication plan in place around the bins so that the job gets done.

In your team though, it might be worth thinking about how accountable the culture is. And if necessary, put some things in place to remedy any shortcomings.

My new book Urgent! was published on 1st August. In this series of videos I am going to unpack some of the key strategies for moderating unproductive urgency.

In this video, Tell Them When You Need It By, I talk about always clearly communicating the due date or deadline when requesting work from others.