How to Build the Productivity of Your Hybrid Team and Free up Your Time

So, you might be in the lucky position that your team is working pretty well. They're remote now, or they're a hybrid team, but it's costing you a lot more time and energy. What do you do about that? Well, the answer is you create self-managing staff, staff that are managing themselves, free you up to get on with your own work.

What would that look like? What would a self-managing team or self-managing staff look like?

Many years ago, I worked for the ABC in Australia. It's probably the premier or most highly regarded media organisation. I worked on Radio National.

Now radio national broadcasters are famously proud of their programs. So what happened over time is they were working incredibly long hours, sometimes twice as much as they needed to get a program out and there was industrial action to reduce the amount of time people spent working.

What we decided to do is that we would still make the programs, but we would only work for the set amount hours per week and the rest of the program - the left over time, that didn't get completed because we weren't doing unpaid overtime anymore would get filled with bird sounds.

Well, the first week went okay. You turned on the radio, program would play and then there was bird music for the rest of the program that was incomplete.

The second week the bird music took less time and by the third week all the programs were back to normal as if nothing had changed. People were working as hard as ever. They had, in fact, become self-managing staff.

Now, think about what it was in that organization that made people work well beyond the normal hours to achieve the program. And you can see a couple of things:

They Had Bought Into The Vision

One is they had bought into the vision. These broadcasters regarded these programs as their own. It wasn't just the radio’s programs, it wasn't the ABC's, it is something they loved and got into. And there was no way they're going to let something go out that they had so much ownership over, you know, half baked.

Teach Your team to do Their own Quality Checks

And the second one, there was an automatic quality check, wasn't there? Their program was going out with their name on it and everyone was going to listen to it and they wanted to make sure the program was damn good.

It failed in that [industrial] action But there’s a great lesson there for you and your team on how you can create great self-managing staff.

There are two things:

·        First of all, get your team to buy into the vision. If they buy into the vision, it becomes theirs and they will make sure it gets done well.

·        And the second one is to introduce an automatic quality check. Now, there's a bunch of questions you can ask people when they finish their work. And if you contact me, I'll send you the little cheat sheet for that.

Essentially, when they finish the task, you want them to do their own quality, check on it. And they want to ask themselves, is this piece of work I've done, done to the standard it needs to? Can I do it better next time?

You Can Spend Less Time Managing Your Team – for the Same or Better Results

So going back to where we started, if you've got a team that are performing well, but you want to reduce the amount of time that you need to spend, managing them, keeping them performing well, what you need to do is create self-managing staff.

And the way to do that is to get them to buy into the vision and to do their own quality checks.

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