Setting your team up for success in 2020.

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The holidays are over and it’s time to hit the ground running. One of the first things you’ll want to do is make sure your strategic goals are set and to paint a clear picture of what winning looks like for the team. The next step involves one of the most important leadership skills–setting the team up for success. 

Building a successful team can be a challenge. A team brings together a variety of personalities, experiences, opinions, and values. However, a great leader can develop teamwork by ensuring trust, commitment, and by focusing on these key concepts. 

Communication

Whether you work remotely or in an office, good communication is one of the most important factors to the success of your team and the work being done. Workfront provides several communication channels to help you collaborate with others—the update stream, Announcement Center, and integrations with Slack, G-Suite and Outlook.

Outside of Workfront, implementing simple strategies such as an open door policy, weekly team meetings, and encouraging two-way feedback can easily increase communication across the team.

Fun fact: Workfront leadership, including our CEO, Alex Shootman, has anonymous suggestion boxes that anyone can email ideas to for review.

Organization

To maximize work efficiency, clearly define the roles and responsibilities of each team member. These roles and responsibilities should be aligned with the strategic goals and values that have been set by your leaders.

Once specified, deep dive into your Workfront environment and find areas that need to be modified to meet your current needs and challenges, based on the responsibilities of your team.

Processes change over time, so you may need to update request queues, edit templates, close out projects, or deactivate unused custom forms. 

As you organize Workfront, find ways to empower your team members with additional responsibilities, such as granting group administrator access or designating a team lead.

Workfront created the Done Right at Workfront (DR@WF) team to help organize not just our cluttered instance but to define how we, as an organization, can be a successful operational system of record. Be sure to read our story and look for the linked resources and templates you can use to shortcut these efforts in your organization.

Education

Technology is constantly changing, and so is the way we work. Investing in continuous education is one way for users to feel empowered. Education provides an opportunity for users to develop new skills, re-envision processes, and streamline business practices within the organization.

Workfront provides several channels for you and your team to expand your knowledge of the platform and connect with other power users on best practices—Ascent Training, Workfront Experience, Community, Ask the Expert webinars, and for an additional cost, Administrator Boot Camp.

Here at Workfront, the Modern Work Enablement team hosts an internal boot camp each quarter to not only train new employees but to provide continuing education and hands-on exercises to existing employees who want to master modern work. Consider implementing the same in your organization, to ensure team members, new and old, are all speaking the same language. 

According to the 2018 Workplace Learning Report from LinkedIn Learning, 

“Each group in our survey identified ‘getting employees to make time for learning’ as the #1 challenge facing talent development in 2018. Yet, 94% of employees say that they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career development. The modern organization needs to meet learners where they already are—aligning development opportunities with employee aspirations, and engaging them through the platforms where they are already spending their time."

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