Managing Team Workflow and Productivity

Awareness and management of the team’s workflow is a critical activity for productive planning and problem-solving teams. It involves monitoring the team’s timeline and progress toward the team’s goals and deliverables, but also monitoring and managing the team’s energy level and climate so the team can maintain progress.

The team’s work will involve iterative cycles of independent reading, research, and reflection. Team members will come together for discourse, to hear what others members have learned, to discuss and build upon their understanding of problems, and to identify knowledge gaps. Then team members will likely return to more independent or small group research and reflection. Throughout these work cycles, the team leader needs to maintain awareness of the team’s “battle rhythm.” When is the rhythm so intense that it is actually counterproductive? At what point does discourse need to end so that independent reading and reflection can occur? Does everyone simply need a break from the intensity of thinking and learning? The team leader needs to balance the reading, the discourse, and knowledge capture so the team does not become stagnant.

Key Issues and Challenges

Managing the team’s workflow requires knowing the personality of the team as a collective unit, and gauging when the team needs to be challenged and when they simply need a break or change in venue. Effective leaders are able to read their team and recognize when team members are frustrated, unfocused, or the ideas are getting stale. Perhaps team members are starting to quarrel because they are tired, hungry, or have been sitting in the room staring at a whiteboard too long. In these moments, effective team leaders recognize the need for a change in activity and for shifting the team’s attention in a way that creates opportunities for members to be most engaged.

Keeping a pulse on the team can be particularly difficult when the leader is also extensively engaged in the intellectual activity of the team. It requires that the team leader participate in the research and the discourse while simultaneously tracking the state of the team and its individual members. Monitoring the team requires the team leader to consciously step back at moments and remove him/herself from the content of the discussion to assess the team’s overall tone and energy level.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for teams is how to balance the tension between external timelines and stakeholder pressure to produce actionable insight, and the time the team needs to do its work well -- time to research, time to think about the problems, time to discuss, and time to just let the ideas “marinate.” Ultimately, the team and its leader need to ensure the team meets the Commanders needs and deadlines, and figure out how to fit their workflow within those constraints.

Tips and Things to Consider

Design and planning team leaders have described several strategies for managing these challenges. These challenges are described next:

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Set expectations for workflow (Expand)

Work collectively to create a schedule and expected flow of activity. This should happen at both the meta-level (i.e., regarding the flow of expected activity over the team’s life cycle) and at a more micro-level (i.e., an agenda for a given meeting, the topics to cover and amount of time for each topic). The schedule should include key milestones (i.e., when key products will be completed and made available to stakeholders) as well as “gateways” when approval must be given for work to continue to a next phase. While the schedule or agenda are meant to be flexible, it should provide members with a vision of what to expect and how to manage their productivity. This will help the team anticipate and mentally prepare for the intense periods of thinking and discussion.

Stay attuned to indicators of mental fatigue (Expand)

Attend to behavioral indications that the team needs to restructure or alter its activity. Some cues that indicate it is time to shift activities are fairly obvious: e.g., low energy, lots of yawning, eyes glazing over, fidgeting. However other clues are not as obvious – e.g., the team is stuck generating the same ideas, the discussion is circular, there are significant lulls in the discussion, members are becoming disagreeable over relatively insignificant issues, and individuals are withdrawing from the discussion or having tangential conversations. Being attuned to these cues can help the leader and other team members recognize when the team needs a break, a change in activity, or a different work setting.

Conduct periodic check-ins on team process (Expand)

Plan for and carve out time to step away from the work itself to discuss how the team is functioning. When the team is in the midst of the work itself, it can be easy to get so caught up in the work that team members forget to think about how the team is working together – to reflect on the dynamics of the team itself. Regular process checks can be particularly helpful in managing the team’s workflow and productivity. Process checks are not focused on content. Rather they are discussions about work style, work processes and progress toward the team’s goals. For example:
- What is working well, and what isn’t with respect to the team’s process?
- Are we doing what we agreed we do? If not, and if we’ve simply evolved, are we ok with that?
- What needs to be adjusted?
- Are we making progress?
- If not, what’s getting in our way?
An experienced team leader suggested holding After Action Review (AAR) sessions to gather feedback from the team and individually with members about how and what can help them be productive .Another potential exercise you might consider for guiding your discussion is the Plus/Delta Exercise.

Tools and Resources

This section provides a set of tools and resources that planning teams may find helpful for preparing the team to work together and for doing the work itself. The tools and resources are organized around the following topic areas: 1) exercises to prepare the team to work together, 2) exercises and videos for preparing the mental workspace, 3) assessment tools, and 4) suggested reading.

Exercises

Pre-Mortem [PDF]
Description: Exercise to identify and address key vulnerabilities in a plan or team vision.

Plus/Delta [PDF]
Description: Exercise to identify and discuss aspects of team process that are working well, and aspects that need to be changed.

Background Exploration Exercise [PDF]
Description: Allows team members to better understand what each individual brings to the team by sharing personal experiences and backgrounds with the team.

Engaging Everyone – Liberating Structures [PDF]
Description: A handbook containing a range of exercises including ice breakers, physical space suggestions, creative thinking techniques, question asking techniques, and approaches for improving interpersonal and team communication.

Assessment tools

Team Role Experience and Orientation (TREO) [PDF]; TREO Survey [PDF]
Description: A teamwork style survey developed by the Army Research Institute (ARI). Designed to help teams and team members examine their preferences and how they typically work in a team.

Clifton StrengthsFinder
Description: Assessment test to uncover one’s personal strengths.

The Cognitive-Style Inventory [PDF]
Description: Assessment to identify cognitive styles and help to anticipate benefits and drawbacks for each.

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