At this time of the year it is a habit of mine to look back at how things went and to look forward to what the following year might bring. It makes me realise how time flies and what a precious good time is. Like most of us, I spend a considerable amount of time working. In order to achieve a healthy work/life balance whilst keeping my drive and ambition going, it is of utmost importance to work efficiently. In what follows I share some practical tips and experiences on how I have experimented this year with using data and technology at work. This has allowed me to free up time which I could re-invest as I saw best fitted.
Tip1: Adopt a data led outcome focus:
What I did first was changing my mind-set from an input focus (working hard, engaging in a variety of activities, adhering to good practice) to one that constantly has the outcome and results in mind. This meant that every talent/people related activity such as performance management was more metric-led, both qualitatively and quantitatively. It led to a positive addiction to checking data to track progress. It felt good to get positive reinforcement. It felt equally gratifying not wasting time and changing course instantly if data told us to do things differently. Data is my new currency as this leads to insights which fuels efficacy.
Tip2: Analyse work patterns through MyAnalytics:
My next tip is to analyse your work patterns through MyAnalytics, a Microsoft application. It is providing data which allows you to work smarter (and improving your focus, wellbeing, network, and collaboration). Taking a deep dive into the report, I realised that I spend a considerable amount in meetings and liaising with people. This as such didn’t surprise me. The nature of my role requires a lot of consultation, influencing and relationship building to achieve the impact and create value. It wasn’t as such the sheer amount though it allowed me to gain insights on who I spend most time with and more importantly who I wasn’t spending as much time with. These insights helped me to avoid the trap of responding to who was shouting the loudest and instead focussing on the area with most potential.
Tip3: Create Dashboards to engage stakeholders:
A tip worth acting upon is sharing data through user friendly dash boards. They offer tons of advantages. First of all it enables clear communication about the end goal. Through timely repetition the message lands with these stakeholders who are most time poor. It offers transparency on progress or lack of it. When several business units or markets are involved, it creates a healthy competition as well as a shared focus and common goal. My personal experience in this regard is that some stakeholders even started asking for the dashboard so it created a “pull” rather than push movement. The dashboards allow to assimilate more data and help to refine the insights on what works and what doesn’t resulting in incremental efficiency gains. Once introduced, it does help to create business cases too to be even more ambitious.
Tip4: Use TEAMS/Zoom/Skype to hold meetings
The use of MyAnalytics taught me that further efficiency gain could be achieved by using technology to hold meetings. So much time is wasted waiting for lifts, finding (and setting/clearing up) the meeting room and even taking notes for non-attendees. A meeting will run more efficiently when starting and finishing on time, when you don’t need to leave in gaps pre and post meeting, when people can catch up with the missed meeting through the shared recording, when all people can share their views which can be built upon through the conversation bar (preference by introverts) or by mic (preference by extraverts), when a shared screen allows people to follow the logic of the solution being thought out or the training being co-developed in less than half the time ( I witnessed this and it was mind blowing), when switched on cameras help to pick up the non-verbal cues if the attention and focus is still there or it is time to end the meeting and give everyone time back into their diary.
Tip5: Use social technology (Zoom, Skype, Teams, Slack …) to fuel collaboration and stimulate both social and experiential learning
I worried that using technology would negatively affect building relationships though my personal experience let me to believe the opposite. I have only met once in real live the colleague I have been collaborating with the most for almost four years …after 12 months of virtual relationship building. It is all about the mind-set. It is important to adapt as in a networked organisation, which most of us need to evolve towards, the solution doesn’t often sit physically in front or next to us any longer. As such, it is important we learn how to build relations effectively virtually. It is a skill I practice explicitly with all participants of a virtual running senior development programme I have been responsible for. It requires people to switch on cameras (they can still eat and drink if they want but not engage in parallel activity). It helps when you make use of all functionality which currently exists with shared whiteboards, shared files/recordings, virtual sub-meeting rooms which you can bring back to a plenary room (only with Zoom thus far), using chat bars, running polls, emojis and gifs to check to keep all people (inter)-active and providing comments/feedback. It creates an atmosphere were all comments are welcomed, where people share readily and learn.
2020
I am encouraged by the many positive effects data and social technology have had on efficiency, productivity, collaboration, skills development and even our climate ( through savings on travel) to experiment further in the new year. This time my focus will be on showing the positive impact data and social technology can have on increasing talent movement/mobility, on effective workforce planning and diversity/inclusion.
Caroline Vanovermeire, December 2019
© 2019 Effra Consult LTD