Do you manage the teams that work 24×7 across the shifts? Especially on 12 hour/day shift and 4 days/week model? If yes, then I would really be interested to know how manage to have team meetings and to the team collectively?
Getting everyone together for a briefing, team meeting, gathering, round table etc., has been a great concern because of the lack of people in office (due to their shift working). Almost half of the team is off on weekly offs every day while half of remaining work in day and rest in the night shift. Thus at any point of time, I have access to only 1/4th of the team at wok (again due to shift working).
Since most of the team members are not available having a team meeting is really out of question and does not really add value. So I would need to develop some method of getting the offline updates across to everyone and make them equally participant in the decision process, which, may last longer than usual one / two hour meeting. It could actually take 1 week depending on the shift schedule.
Few things I have been contemplating of implementing are,
A discussion forum – Creating an online discussion forum where each discussion topic is listed and kept open for a period of 1 week. Offline reminders are sent to the team to go through the discussion forum and the comments / questions are invited and are answered through further replies / comments over the forum.
Offline recording of meetings – Record the meeting discussions in audio / video formats and again share with the team offline. Invite comments over the recording & engage them into question / answer session offline. Create a Question Basket where you invite questions and get them answered through email replies / audio recordings or video sessions.
Issue tracker & project update acknowledger – Create an online application where the important decisions are stored and compel the team members to acknowledge that they have read and understood these decisions. If they have issues, they can raise queries back to the manager via online application.
There might be few more things I could possibly do, but I would really like to know if you have any good suggestions which I could take on board and try and implement them so as to work even more effectively.
Please leave a comment, a feedback or a note on my blog if you could help.
Comments