 Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Yeah, this is better. Thank you. Hi. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the session on best practices for effective team management. I'm Akshita. I'm marketing leader at OpenSense Labs. OpenSense Labs is a Drupal agency based out of India. We create awesome digital products and great Drupal-related services to organizations globally. I had a co-speaker, unfortunately, he did not get the visa on time, so here I am alone. So before we start this session, let's start with a why. Why is team management important and why are we talking about it, discussing it in this conference? Anyone from the audience? Any guesses? Okay. So some would say maybe for productivity to ensure that things are being done on time, right? So yes, for the success of your project, it majorly is dependent on the people. The people you are working with, they can make or break your project. They can turn ordinary performance into extraordinary. They can also give technical solutions, the oomph that will produce outstanding results. And so since we are working with them, we should care about them. Alone as managers, we cannot actually deliver the projects neither on time nor with that quality that we can with a team. Moving on, let's talk about team effectiveness. What are the characteristics of an effective team? Majorly they can be described into three points, team output, collaborative ability, individual learning and well-being. So when we are talking about team output, we are majorly covering here if your team is able to achieve their targets or exceed the expectations in time. This is one of the primary characteristics of an effective team. And as project managers or marketeers, it's easy to identify if your team overall is effective or not, since we have quantitative measures to cover them. Collaborative ability. This is another important characteristic since as a team, effective teams who work together will get to know each other better. As they learn how to work with each other better and coordinate their activities better. So moving on to individual learning and well-being. Effective teams positively contribute to the learning and well-being of each other. Team members being part of the team can help expand knowledge. As team members, we should be looking forward to learning new things from each other. If not daily, then maybe monthly or weekly. We'll move on to the challenges of team management. These are some of the common challenges. Of course the list is very long and these are only a few that have been mentioned. In remote work environment especially, lack of common trust can become a huge hurdle. Poor communication. Not in terms of skills but miscommunication can often happen when you have large dispersed teams. There's a lack of clarity in the goals and the tasks assigned. Maybe there is over dependence on a team leader or any particular member working in isolation. Team members have been working alone for a long time and so they have this challenge of working in a team effectively. Which can again hamper the team performance and individual performance as well. And then interpersonal conflicts and as managers it's important for us to resolve them and still be able to work together effectively. So these are some of the factors that we will be talking about. These have been majorly identified by Richard Hackman, if you have heard about him. He was a pioneer in team management practices and he was also a professor. So we'll start with direction. To ensure that your team works effectively there needs to be a common direction, a common goal that everyone in the team knows about. This means you need to set up a goal which is clear, it's challenging and of sufficient consequence to motivate your team members to strive to work together. Then we come to the structure of the team. This can again affect the effectiveness of your output and delivery. The team structure, it's conduct, the way it organizes and works on its tasks has to enable teamwork and not impede it. Let's say there's a team of 20 developers and there is one senior developer who is leading the project. In that case, if for every small concern or help every developer has to reach out to this one person, the team structure itself will fail the output. It will create a bottleneck and so will affect the effectiveness of the entire team performance. An easy solution to this would be a better structure where you can have mid-level resources aligned three or four developers who the junior resources can directly reach out and the senior developer can work together with these three or four people to overall work on the project outcome. Then we have communication. Effective communication is very, very critical and I can't emphasize enough on it. It distributes the needed information between the team members and it enables them to build a cooperative work relation. In my previous organization, we had an experiment where there were six to seven people from different teams who have never worked together with each other. We were sitting with a performance coach and one of us was asked to put down a work-related problem that she was currently facing. Five minutes later, everyone was discussing on the solution and no one was able to come to a common consensus where the performance coach asked us to stop and we realized that everyone interpreted the problem differently and no one was remotely close to what the actual problem was. This was the case when everyone was sitting in the room together in a proximity of one meter, I would say. In remote teams, this can become a major challenge which needs to be addressed effectively. Then we have support. Having a supportive context within the organization allows the team to work effectively. This means that the team is receiving adequate resources, rewards, information and cooperation or the support from the organization if not immediately from the team to do the work. We'll come to the best practices now. In our company, we have been following almost all of these practices. Some of these we are planning to adopt and whatever we have done has really worked well for us. Then we have a compelling direction. Setting direction helps your teams to create important factors like accountability. Team synergy is created and sustained through your vision, goals and milestones. In our team, we ensure that we have our team goals, yearly goals at least documented and everyone in the team, new members, old members, repeatedly we go through them to understand where we are. If we are on track, what are the goals that we missed, what are the goals that we have achieved and those that we have achieved, the milestones that we have achieved, we celebrate them. It's important that the team feels their work is being acknowledged and celebrated. Solid structure in place. We already discussed how poor structure can really hamper team performance. We'll start with the setting up of basic team rules. These can be very unique to your own teams. I'm a sports person, so when I was in sports, when I was young, my coach, every time there was this one basic rule, every time we tried something new and someone said no, they were punished. They were asked to go for a duck walk for 100 meters, which would remind them what the team rules are, how to function. Words hold that power. They affect our psychology. When you say no in the first instance, there is a negative thought process that goes on and you are focusing more on the challenge rather than on the solution. Personally, in my team, we like to, for any new challenge, any new task that we are working on or are assigned, we like to say this is something new and I would want to learn more about it instead of saying no, I can't do it. So this also sets up basic expectations within the team and goes both ways. Assigning clear roles and responsibilities. Often it happens, I'm not sure about the larger, bigger organizations, but in smaller agencies, we are wearing like hats with multiple feathers and almost everyone is as skilled as any other team member, which means there will be an overlap of skills, roles and responsibilities, which again means that sometimes there's an assumption that the other person would take care of it and the task is left unattended. So when you are setting up team goals, which we discussed in the previous slide, it's also important to have individual roles and responsibilities assigned and aligned, which would also give the sense of accountability to the team members and ensure that the tasks are being taken care of. Then comes the communication. Set expectations and debrief regularly. This is very important for almost all the projects that we take, short term marketing campaigns, long term goals, long term projects. We ensure that we have debrief set at the end of the project. If not at the end of the project, in case it's a longer one, we'll have one at the end of the week. To understand what are the challenges the teammates are facing and to address those challenges, so those are not repeated. It's often said that it's not hard work that burns out the people, but rather the feeling that their work doesn't matter. When you address their challenges, when you provide them right feedback, it makes them feel heard. It creates a positive mindset in the team and a positive culture. For remote teams, these tools can really help. Some of them are proprietary, some of them are free tools, providing support. In our organization, whenever someone new joins the team, I ensure that other than their roles in KPIs, we have an informal catch up where I would like to know what their goals in life are other than their work. It helps create a bond with the team member. It helps create that trust between the new member and your manager. Recently, a new team member joined my team. She's just out of college supporting her single mother, a really hardworking girl. I talked to her and I realized that she wants to do a master's MBA, which in India would cost you around 60,000 euros, which is a big deal in INR. We sat down and discussed how she can achieve that goal other than work. What are the skills that she needs to take care of? How much time is she aiming for the MBA? What are the financial challenges that she might face? And finally, what are the colleges where she can apply? Constantly, we have a one-on-one catch up at the end of the month, where we are both talking about her work progress as well as her individual growth plan. What she has been doing. How can she make the things better? Initially, this will not give good results. I would say more or less people would not fill in those sheets or do as much as they can. But with regular sessions, that will really help the team members also feel that it's not just the company goals or the team goals that matter. Even their personal goals matter. Then we have providing a forum to discuss growing pains. Again, this is something that the team members should feel they are being heard again. At the end of the month, we have one-on-one sessions, just between the team member and the RM. And the second, where we have someone from the people operations team, the HR team. Where we closely work on understanding what were the growing pain points and the challenges for that month. If they were able to reach their monthly KPIs or not, how could they do it better? And we also have an individual growth plan in place, which we recently started to understand. Again, what are their professional goals? So someone who is joined as a content writer might have a goal that in next one year or six months they would want to be a digital marketer. So what are the skills that they need? We identify the courses that might help them. Every month in those one-on-one sessions, we also track the progress on those courses that they have done. We ensure that the learnings from that session do not go unnoticed. We track the learnings also, which again, it's like telling that you cannot fool us. And yes, that's it. And lastly, blowing off some steam together. It's very important when we were in office, it was a different culture. We used to hang out together. We used to have water cooler chats, which was important to just chill and get to know people together. That's not the case in remote. Currently in this picture, there are six people. One of them is a completely remote employee. Two of them are hybrid employees and the remaining come to office daily. So we have a quarterly catch-up called Chai Pe Chacha, which loosely translates to catch-up over tea. Again, there is a basic rule that you need to have a drink, some sort of drink to participate in this session. We sit for around 45 minutes to one hour. We discuss what are the things that we are doing in life. It also helps understand personally what the other person is going through in their personal life. There might be some personal issues that may have caused some challenges in their work life. So these sessions really help bring the team together. So these are the six people in the team. Yes, support each other. At the end of the day, we all are humans and we are working towards the same goals in any capacity. Here's a quick recap. These are the four factors, direction, structure, communication, support. These are the activities or things that you can do to ensure that these are being taken care of for direction. Have a team vision documented, set up team goals, regularly catch up on those goals, celebrate your milestones. For structure, set up a basic team rules, assign clear roles and responsibilities to everyone. Set up your processes right for communication. Actively participate in communication. Ensure that every team member is being heard. Provide them regular feedback and set expectations and debrief regularly. To support your team members, leverage informal meetups. Whatever it is in your capacity, you might be a smaller organization. You might not be able to afford a performance coach. But you might have some senior mentors in your team who can help provide that guidance and coaching to your team members. It's important that you are taking active steps in helping your team members out. And then have a forum where everyone in the team feels free to discuss their pain points. It doesn't matter if it's about the other team member or about you as a manager to change your practices. That's it. Thank you.