A big challenge that many of us have, particularly those who work at digital agencies, is finding time to work on tasks and projects that fall outside of day-to-day or BAU work. These may be things that look at the bigger picture of your company or team and seek to improve what you do or how you do it.
A great example right now is experimenting with AI and seeing what it can (and can’t) do to help you and your team. We sometimes worry about spending too much time on this kind of task because we don’t know where it will lead and what the outcome will be.
The worry becomes even bigger when we have a list of BAU tasks to be getting on with!
One way to describe this is the whirlwind, which I’ve written about before if you’re unfamiliar with the term.
In the article above, I wrote about how you can step out of the whirlwind as a manager and ensure that you’re working on tasks that aren’t just BAU.
Today, I want to expand upon that article and talk about how you can bring your team along with you on that journey and get them working on tasks/projects that improve the team as a whole.
Acknowledge and embrace the whirlwind
The chances are that your team will already be well aware of the challenges posed by the whirlwind. They just may not have used this terminology or given it any kind of label. Worst still, they are probably at the point where they are feeling it but have accepted that it’s just the way it is i.e. they’ll never get time to prioritise non-BAU tasks that are important to them and the team.
Your job as their manager is to throw the problem out into the open, which is the first step towards resolving it and improving the situation.
So take some time to talk to them about this and how you understand their frustration, but that you want to help improve the situation. This doesn’t need to be a big deal or a special meeting, you can almost certainly include this as a talking point during an existing team meeting.
Be careful not to accidentally infer that BAU / day-to-day / whirlwind tasks are a bad thing.
Quite the opposite – these are tasks that are necessary in order for the team and company to function properly. They form the foundation of your team’s roles and responsibilities. So be careful not to talk about them in a negative way or imply that they are any less important than non-BAU tasks.
Explain the importance of improving as a team
This may not take too much explanation, but it’s still work being clear that part of your job as a manager is to step outside of the day-to-day tasks and look for ways to improve the team as a whole. You could give some examples such as:
- Looking for ways to improve the quality of your deliverables and results across all projects.
- Becoming more efficient with the time that you spend on tasks.
- Finding ways to automate repetitive tasks.
- Ensuring that you’re being effective with your time and communication with each other.
- Exploring how you can upskill the team and deliver better work.
Giving examples like this can also prompt your team to think of ways that they can improve what they do.
Which leads us into the next point nicely.
Get some basic, low effort ideas from them
If you want your team to carve out and commit time to non-BAU tasks, then you should involve them from the beginning of the process.
This means that in the first instance, simply ask them for some high-level ideas on what they would like to improve within the team.
Here are a few questions that you can use to prompt the team on this:
- If you could wave a magic wand and improve one thing about the team right now, what would it be?
- Finish this sentence: “surely there is a better and quicker way to….”
- What gets in the way of you doing your absolute best work every day?
For now, keep this really simple by asking for just a few lines or bullet points for the ideas – nothing that’s going to take too much time or headspace.
Collate all of the ideas together and if needed, ask for a bit more information or context so that each idea is as clear as possible.
Get their feedback on the ideas so far
Once you’ve collated all of the ideas from the team, whether this is in a document or spreadsheet etc, share them all with the team and get them to vote for the ideas that they would like to work on the most.
If you use Google Docs, there is a handy little feature that allows you to do this within the document itself.
At the end of this process, you should have a super clear idea of what ideas your team feels could make the biggest improvements to what they do.
Of course, you should also have final sign off on these ideas and need to use your best judgement to assess which ones are most realistic to achieve.
Finally, order the tasks or projects and reshare with your team so that they know where you are going to start.
Ring fence some time to go deeper on these ideas together
Now, you need to start making all of this real and showing your team that you’re prepared to put aside time for you all to work on non-BAU tasks.
Most importantly, you need to ensure that this time is protected and to give them permission to step away from their day-to-day work for this session. This may mean that you ask them to:
- Not put any other meetings or calls over the top of this time.
- Set their email autoresponders to let anyone know that email replies may be delayed by a few hours.
- If they are bringing laptops to a meeting, not to check email or Slack etc during the session.
- If you are running this session remotely, ask them to be present and not check email or Slack.
The important thing here is to tell them that it’s okay to put BAU work down for a few hours (or even less) and focus on these bigger tasks that you want to work on as a team.
You need to decide how best to use this time together. For example, you may pick one task or project and spend a few hours working on it together until it’s completed and rolled out.
If this isn’t possible, you may spend the time working through the specification, brief or outline for each one instead, before handing it over to a member of the team to continue working on.
Carve out time for them as individuals to work on these tasks
Leading on from the previous point, if you decide to get the team to continue working on these tasks and projects individually (or as smaller groups), then you need to help them set aside the time to do this.
Again, how you do this is up to you. The main thing is to give your team permission to set aside this time and to protect it if the whirlwind inevitably appears.
I should mention here that if an actual emergency or truly important + urgent task appears, then of course your team may need to go and work on it. But the truth is that the vast majority of problems that will appear can wait a few hours!
Schedule this time on a regular basis
Finally, all of the above can’t just be a one-off exercise. Otherwise the frustrations and whirlwind will continue to dominate your time and reduce the chances of you working on non-BAU projects.
Schedule the team-wide sessions on a regular basis – perhaps once every few months and then allow the team to set their own schedule for any individual tasks that they are working on.
Use the team meetings to check in on progress and hold people accountable for what they said they were going to do.
If they have struggled to find time because of BAU stuff, work with them to understand why and try to ensure that they find the time moving forward.
If you can do this, then you’ll end up with a nice balance between your team getting their day-to-day work done well, whilst taking some time out to look at the big picture and improving what you do as a team.
