Most of us have lamented 24-hour work days as a double-edged sword. There never seems to be enough time in the “regular” day to tackle every task and polish each project. So we get crafty, heading into the office early, overlapping meetings (counting on the usual warm-up/close-down chatter), set the BlackBerrys aflame, and ride the broadband wave at home late into the night.
As every person who burns candles at both ends knows, these tactics eventually become debilitating habits leading to exhaustion, stress-induced illness, and mental fatigue. These habits can increase your risk exposure (overlooked details, poor communication, sloppy procedure) if not kept in check. While the economy has affected almost every business in terms of sales, workforce strength, and operations, there are some simple ways organizations can mitigate common “do more with less” pressures.
Agree on what’s important
Don’t let competing priorities, turf wars, or personal agendas impede efficiency or progress. Rally groups around an iterative framework focused on organizational (not departmental) goals. Scrum is a form of agile development often used in software development, but its principles can be applied to any type of project/program management. Scrum emphasizes communication, collaboration, and the flexibility to adapt to emerging business realities. Any company can easily adapt Scrum to suit their own industry or channel, creating a transparent benchmark and reporting system.
Accessible, easy-to-use collaboration software like Basecamp can support a shared framework like Scrum. Basecamp allows you to set up individual projects, assign specific users, share files, establish tasks and tie them to milestones. Best of all, no one gets accidentally omitted from a message (like with conventional email) thanks to the user group assignments. Basecamp acts like a central repository, providing the continuous “input” support needed for users to act quickly and responsibly.
Make information available to others
Benefits of Scrum include increased transparency, personal accountability, and higher levels of commitment created by the redrawing of functional ownership lines. Continue weaving these themes throughout your organization by adopting a few online tools and ensuring all employees know how to access and use them.
Use a keyword research tool to determine the phrases bearing the strongest, most relevant results for the topics pertaining to your business. Then set up Google Alerts to track and report online mentions of those important keywords. Results can be published to an RSS feed, which others can subscribe to via an RSS reader, their smartphone, or likely the company intranet. Yahoo! Pipes is a highly configurable alternative to Google Alerts.
Set up a Delicious account specifically for bookmarking information relevant to your broad business dealings. Macro categories (tags) could include those listed below, supplemented by more micro-level tags to aid with faster, more refined search results.
- Primary Competition
- Secondary/Emerging Competition
- Media Mentions (for your brand)
- Industry Trends
- Research (or Reports)
- Markets (or Channels)
Re-Think Processes
Today’s work environment, created by economic, technological, and cultural shifts surpassing events of the prior two years, requires business leaders to reexamine time-honored methods and communication funnels. Tighter budgets, talent gaps, and organizational inefficiencies are wreaking havoc with relevant, well-defined product and speed-to-market, often with an unfortunate downstream effect on customer engagement.
A fresh mindset, executive-level support, and operational transparency all help create a positive new environment capable of encouraging individual contributions for the good of the group.
About The BtoBblogger: Heather Rast is an integrated marketer, driver of insights, and passionate business change agent. She looks for the intersection of relevance, differentiation, and needs fulfillment to help craft holistic strategies that deliver organizational value and nurture consumer affinity. Follow her on Twitter or read her blog at www.insightsandingenuity.com.
