During difficult circumstances, resiliency is crucial. Consider these suggestions to build stronger, more knowledgeable teams that are ready to face the challenges ahead. It takes experience and training to build a strong product management organization. It’s also impossible to train your employees to be resilient if resilience isn’t already ingrained in the company’s DNA. It’s much more challenging to do so through difficult circumstances. But it’s not out of the question. It all starts with you, leaders.
Here are some suggestions for increasing the resiliency of your management team during these difficult times:
1.Treat The Workday As Though It Was 24-Hours
Everything you do should be predicated on the notion of a 24-hour day if your company spans across different countries and time zones. It allows team leaders to consider their geographically scattered team members as part of a single overall team servicing their clients, rather than several teams that may or may not be aligned.
2.Consider Overlapping Abilities
Consider the talents your team possesses throughout a 24-hour workday against the skills it has overall. You can’t always predict when an event will occur, but you can ensure that particular essential skill sets are shared amongst teams.
To discover any gaps, create a skills matrix and compare it to the demands of your global consumers. If your team is supporting a specialty product for a customer, for example, ensure the skill set required to keep that product is accessible in your time zone and in the time zones next to it.
It ensures that new staff members who can assist with a problem are never more than a region away, which might be the difference between a dissatisfied and a delighted customer.
3.Keep Communication Lines Open
It takes some work to stay in contact as a resilient team. Resiliency extends beyond conventional team meetings when everyone is informed and exchanged in a waterfall structure, with an “always-on” attitude.
You and your team should employ a messaging system that is constantly available to your team and, when necessary, to your clients. It establishes a precedent that they are immediately accessible to contribute to the team if someone is working.
Always-on communications foster a culture where messaging is the natural way to communicate and cooperate with other team members, eliminating response delays. It’s essential to keep remote team members engaged with one another.
4.Have A Contingency Plan In Place
Nobody can foretell family emergencies or other unforeseen situations, yet they are bound to happen at any time: You can count on it. The first step in dealing with unexpected team absences is to: Assume that they will occur at the most inconvenient times. Assume that unforeseen absences will occur at the worst possible moment.
You should be able to call out to your team and acquire a stand-in without missing a beat in a matter of minutes. The same concept applies to scheduled absences; therefore, devise a strategy that allows your team members to transfer their tasks to take vacation time.
In either case, transitioning the workload to maintain business continuity is critical. It comes with an added benefit: team members are less stressed when they know they can rely on a backup when they need to be away.
5.Make Information Available.
Strive to make information – from fundamental business policies to corporate and customer knowledge – available in two clicks when establishing a resilient workforce. Remind your teams that keeping information secret benefits no one and may even damage them. It’s critical to make information easily accessible to everyone, whether you’re serving internal or external clients. Consider putting your documents in a file cabinet in your home: If you were ill unexpectedly, no one would have access to that information, making it almost hard for anybody to step in and help you while you were gone.
Make calendars visible to all team members as a simple first step. Then, if a team member is forced to leave the workplace abruptly, a colleague may step in and take over any scheduled meetings.
The work will be something, and it will make the entire thing in some dependency that may generate the whole thing. The phrases that may have led to the scenario, which will be vital and relieving in some way
6.Make Sure Your Team Is Ready For Hardship
It’s critical to teach your employees the soft skills they’ll need to deal with hardship. We are currently confronted with unprecedented problems on a global basis, but the same can be said for local events. Developing a culture of camaraderie, in which individuals care about one another, is critical for any remote team.
Ascertain that your team members realize that discussing these problems freely at team meetings is acceptable. There should be no constraints when it seems to discuss global, regional, or local concerns. It gives everyone the impression that they are dealing with hardship compassionately and as a team.
Finally!
PALARINO PARTNERS can help you build a better product team than ever before.
Let’s face it: the workplace has evolved. To build a successful product team in a post-COVID world, you’ll need all of the methods we’ve considered so far, as well as others we don’t even know about yet. PALARINO PARTNERS can assist you in setting the scene for a product team that feels secure, supported, and comfortable in their workplace.