Eye on the Workforce

You have probably experienced the disappointment of realizing that the budget you are provided is very tight for what your team is being asked to do. You feel like you are at a disadvantage from the start. Maybe the sponsor is not fully aware of what is involved. The sponsor may have unrealistic expectations. You don't want inadequate funding to reflect badly on your team!

It's easy to become demotivated at this point - IF you are not sure how to prepare for this situation.

When you are assigned a tight budget, it's time to discuss it with your team in a positive and constructive way. Your team is a valuable asset and can help manage the situation. They can anticipate problems and help develop effective communications related to those problems.

Important Understanding of Your Project Budget

Before speaking with your team, it is useful to have some background related to your project budget. If you are involved with or receive communications about organizational strategy, you may have detailed knowledge of how the budget was generated. You may have access to a business case that clarifies background and expectations. In other situations, you may only have a brief discussion with your sponsor to learn about the budget. Either way, this is good information to have before you discuss the budget with your team.

The budget may be able to be increased with justification following an escalation process. Or it may be that the solution your team is delivering will not be worth the expense beyond your assigned budget (or something close). If this information can be shared with your team, it will serve as a basis for planning. It will also help the team feel connected to the strategy.

Address any Adversarial Attitude

Once your project team finds out about a constrained budget, they will very easily fall into a frustrated “us” against “them” attitude. This will lead to unconstructive behaviors that will reduce performance and make the workplace less enjoyable, unless you take action.

You can avoid the team getting into an adversarial attitude by facilitating conversations toward an approach that is positive and constructive. As you facilitate, maintain a positive attitude to lead by example, even if you feel the frustration strongly. Listen patiently to any complaints and redirect discussion toward these points:

• The business case for the effort, including background and whether the sponsor and stakeholders prefer to increase the budget only when more information is captured during delivery.
• A tight budget is like any project constraint.  The team will plan to meet the constraint and then monitor to confirm the plan is working. Keep it routine.
• This situation can actually be an opportunity. How the team responds will show how highly developed it is. Teams that communicate accurately and in a timely fashion about the budget risks are seen as valuable in an organization. If the team is successful at letting sponsor know quickly when there is a significant danger of running overbudget – and the reason why - it will reflect well on the team.
• Outstanding teams identify risks that will be most likely to result in the budget being exceeded. Focusing on these risks in routine work and project reports is the mark of advanced teams.

Of course, you will adjust the detail of the above points based on the experience level of your team or individual team members. You can facilitate more experienced team members to persuade less experienced team members that it is possible to succeed even under a frustratingly low budget.

Be ready to field questions or statements that are based in fear. Acknowledge that fear for the benefit of the team member and other team members. A team member may have been burned before in a project with a tight budget. Once the fear has been acknowledged, it is fine to move on to facts or possible actions.

Do not give this facilitation step a quick pass. You don’t want to leave fear or resentment simmering in your team. Take the minutes necessary to air grievances and discuss opportunities.

Once you have the team looking at the tight budget more optimistically, you can move on to the next step, identifying those factors that will tend to bust your project budget. With the team’s improved attitude, they should have energy to create a good list with the knowledge that they are promoting themselves while protecting the organizational strategy.

This step of looking at budget risks will be covered in my next post.

Don’t forget that you can also find my articles on this site.

Hybrid work is causing problems. Many employers have required workers to return in some way, and workers are not happy about it. Worse, employers know return-to-office (RTO) policies have not brought about desirable results but do not know exactly what to do next. 

So, you are stuck on the front line of a problem you have little control over - again.

There is a way to turn this difficult situation into a positive, however. If you understand certain details of the background of the situation you can use your leadership skills to help meet your team goals and your employer's goals.

First, Understand the Employers' Situation

Employers brought workers back because they wanted at least two known benefits of workplace face-to-face interaction. Simply stated, these are innovation and camaraderie. Unfortunately, they did it wrong. They assumed that just being back would create the environment necessary to meet those goals. Employers are in the unenviable situation of having to force people to maintain a failed approach which makes the work environment even worse, especially for camaraderie.

• Employers are generally not sure how to meet their goals, so are forced to extend the inadequate policies while they figure it out.
• Some, who have not previously checked whether employees are actually coming to the office, are starting routine checks with sanctions for those who refuse to follow the policies.
• Workplace consultants have summarized the inadequacy here as employers not arranging for the correct activities to foster innovation and camaraderie.

Second, Understand the Employee Position

Workers generally like the flexibility afforded by working from home. They feel that they have proven they can be productive working remotely. When they have to go to work, they do not like the commute, and once they get there, they do not see any value to it. Often, "coffee badging" results where the worker comes to work only to be seen and then leaves.

• Resentment builds in the workplace - just the opposite of what employers want

These two situations make your job more difficult, but, understanding them helps you with your intervention to make office time better.

Tactics to Make Office Time Better

"Making office time better" means that you are helping meet your employer's goals while helping workers get more value out of the in-office experience. Here are some ideas to get you started. Your situation may call for something different, but your objectives are the same.

Add activities for the team to build rapport and solve problems.

Bring everyone in at the same time, consistent with their schedule.

• Conduct team-building activities that will build on the current maturity of the team.
• Eat lunch together and talk informally about shared interests.
• Identify team problems and consider solutions.

Create opportunities for innovation.

Set up interactions with unrelated teams or specialists. While this may sound unusual, innovation has been shown to arise from interaction and coordination between disparate individuals or groups. It comes from one group utilizing learning from an unrelated group.

• This is the kind of interaction employers have been hoping would happen under their RTO policies, but the policies do not necessarily facilitate these desired interactions. You, however, can help facilitate these interactions.
• Ask team members what will work for them. They may want to have a session with an expert or meet with another team to create best practices. Suggest that they think about cross functional groups to have face to face conversations with to see how disparate groups solve similar problems or work successfully in the work environment.
• Bring experts in to talk face-to-face with your team. Help make sure there is a low-stress, positive atmosphere where sharing is low-risk. Let the experts talk about how they do things and let your team focus on anything they find useful.
• "Innovation" in this case is high levels of improvement quickly by using new tools, processes or techniques unknown previously.

An Important Next Step for Your Career

Once you understand what leaders are after and what workers are experiencing, you can intervene effectively to increase worker satisfaction and improve their ability to innovate. But don't forget a critical step: Once you do this, communicate to managers and leaders what you have done. If you have achieved positive results, communicate them.

If your organization is stuck in an RTO-resentment ditch as so many are, you will show yourself as the rare type of leader that is part of the solution. This type of opportunity does not come around often, so use these simple steps as inspiration to form your own plan.

Bonus tip: In a larger organization, work with performance improvement specialists or middle managers to determine the best activities for your team, suggested specialists to contact, and to make it easier for you to communicate your efforts in this pain point so that you can get the recognition you deserve.

Don't miss my articles, also on ProjectManagement.com.

You have team management routines already established in your project or agile effort. Use these to make sure you are properly managing the mental health of your team. Meetings can be a useful way to identify potential mental health problems and start to deal with them.

Periodic Team Meetings

Where you work mental health may not be a common topic. With the preparation you make as described in Part 1, though, it can be an unsurprising topic in your team meetings. Here's how to include mental health topics in these meetings.

• Proactively remind team members to take time for self-care. This helps them with building the habit of taking necessary breaks and using resources that your organization provides.
• Provide other helpful reminders or tips based on your research described in Part 1.
• Ask mental health related questions. Use informal terms and phrases such as "We are coming up to a stressful point in our execution" or "Well that was a surprising turn of events. What do you think about that extra work involved?".
• Follow-up on the initial responses to your questions and get input from everyone who is willing to share in the meeting. Look for anyone who is struggling and consider a separate follow-up meeting to investigate further. See below for more.
• If your questions uncover significant stress or anxiety in the team as a whole, ask the team what the best way to respond is. They do not have to know immediately. Also bring up any relevant information or resources your organization provides. If your organization does not provide relevant resources, communicate your researched expert resources.

Individual Meetings

You may have a routine individual meeting with team members. Do not hesitate to use these sessions to identify and address mental health problems. Without the whole team listening, an individual may be more forthcoming.

• Keep the meeting agenda but look for discussion points that enable you identify potential difficulties.
• Ask how the teammate is feeling in such a way that circumvents knee jerk responses like "I'm fine" or "doing good". To do this, ask about a specific experience. For example, "How did it go with the review?" Or "What did you have to do to meet the deadline?" These will bring about more useful responses so you can determine what the individual's experience has been and how they are reacting to it.
• If you do uncover situations where a team member admits to overwork, anxiety, potential burnout, conflicts in work/life balance or similar mental health struggles, be supportive. Use empathetic language that you have prepared previously. Create phrasing for your supportive and empathetic comments beforehand so that they sound like they come from you naturally.
• Refer the team member to the best resources.

 Ad Hoc Incidences

Ad hoc meetings where you speak with someone specifically about immediate mental health challenges they are having at home or work are a good place for an intervention if you are prepared as described in Part 1.

• If, for example, your organization has a phone number to call for those who are struggling, then your effective intervention will likely be to empathize with the team member and then advise them to call the number right away.
• Determine if you can make other immediate adjustments to allow the individual to get past this difficulty. For example, you may be able to increase flexibility for to complete work, provide a day off to deal with a family situation, and so on.

 Again, you are not a therapist. Leave diagnosing and treatment to the experts. Your role only involves the early identification and advice to follow existing resources provided for this purpose. Don’t go too far, yet be confident in your role by building your expertise and preparing your phrasing. See this work as an advanced extension of your leadership skills, because it most certainly is.

But, if you create a working environment where mental health and stressors are regularly discussed, identified, and dealt with, the team will be happier and more productive in a sustainable way. Even if it is rare to identify a team or individual mental health difficulty, the fact that you have created an environment that makes the discussions routine will set you apart as an effective leader and improve the long-term performance of your team.

I’m sure you’ve seen reports of workers paying more attention to their mental health. Maybe you have noticed it in the workplace. Maybe you have seen communications from your organization supporting mental health. Did seeing any of these make you wonder what you could do – or would be expected to do – as a team leader?

What can you do exactly? You are not a therapist. You do not have a degree in Psychology (probably). In fact, you may be a little concerned that you could be asked to get involved in people’s personal problems, something you may not have signed up for and may not be good at. Still, you want to make sure your team is productive and happy, so perhaps your next question is, "what are the basic things I need to do to effectively deal with my team's mental health?"

 That's a question we can work with. With that as your scope, techniques are available to add into your existing routines. Just making these initial adjustments will create a better work environment consistent with contemporary needs.

 Start your project with awareness and supportiveness

Your initial moves should indicate that the topic of mental health is “acceptable” to discuss and that the team will address it if necessary.

• At a team meeting early in the effort (or as soon as you can), explain to the team that mental health is important.

• Share an example of a work-related experience where you had to take time to improve your mental health.

• Have teammates share their own experiences of stressors in the workplace. If you keep the early discussion related to the workplace, it helps create a bond and allows you to make notes on what the team is experiencing currently. This allows you to monitor for these stressors in the future looking for ways to avoid or reduce their impacts.

• Provide information on resources available from your organization. This is how you avoid being some kind of expert in mental health. You become successful by making sure there is an awareness of a potential problem and refer team members to appropriate resources created by experts.

• Explain that addressing mental health is important to individual team members and the team. Even though you used work examples previously, make sure to specify that family and personal issues are included.

• If you know at this time what accommodations you specifically can make for mental health, provide examples. These may be brief time away or flexible weekly schedules.

Do quick research to prepare

Now that you know what to do in the early meeting on mental health, it should be pretty clear that you need to prepare beforehand. Some of these preparation steps you may already have done for other reasons (because you are a good leader, right?). Any of these might be suitable for your situation:

• Look over your organization’s communications about mental health for how it is prioritized. This will provide you with help to craft your own message and tone. You will not want to stray from the organizational message. Better to rephrase in your own words and refer the team to the exact message.

• Research your organization's benefits around mental health so that you can speak to them briefly. There should be a page and/or a message that you can leverage. You might want to have a summary bullet list and a link ready for use in meetings. Something as simple as a phone number to call for mental health assistance will make a huge difference.

• In the above communications, you may find that there is written guidance for individuals as to how to report larger problems to their manager, which may not be you. There may be self-care instructions that help individuals better make mental health part of their routine. Look for a quick link that you can use for guidance such as this.

• While you are researching the above, note the signs and symptoms of mental health problems, including burnout, so that you can identify and refer team members who may be suffering.

This blog has been full of ideas over the years to help make workers more productive and happier. The new twist, which is very important, is the specific focus on mental health. Most organizations now have targeted resources and are making it a point to address mental health issues.  

This is a timely response, because team members are more aware of the importance of mental health and are speaking out when there is a problem. They will value your efforts at creating a healthier work environment. They will value your efforts to help individuals who are suffering mental health issues.

Part 2 will cover how to make mental health part of your usual routines, so managing it does not affect your mental health!

Like this blog topic? Check out my hundreds of articles on this site. They are generally about people management. Never underestimate how this topic can propel your career!

What  is the difference between management and leadership? Alert reader Luis Branco suggested this question in a comment to an article I wrote and it is a good question to ponder. In my experience there is less a binary definition than a continuum. On one extreme there is being a beacon for people to follow as they struggle through a dark,  uncertain period to get to a brighter future. On the other extreme is driving efficient task management.

In this post and my previous article  on "leading questions", I focus more on the leadership side for common situations in the PM world where skills should be built up. It may be a while before you are able to be an executive communicator, but you do have opportunities now to rise above common project management task wrangling and do leadership-side preparation and communications. If you are a newer project manager, this type of leadership skill can help you move into more complex projects and be recognized as a more advanced project manager. Many of us have done the same. If you have more experience, but need more focus to improve, there are tactics below to help.

Know Your Targets:  Project Team

For your leadership-side communications to your project team members,  you need to help them prepare for the future (medium-term to long-term), to understand the environment in which they work, and to see the larger context of their efforts. This context is beyond managing to a task list, no matter how sophisticated it is. Note also how this communication is parallel to an executive providing the context of the marketplace and "direction" for the organization.

Ask yourself these "leading questions". Add more questions for your situation. Not all questions are relevant to all situations, but you should have at the ready a broad list to make sure you  to stay ahead of emerging problems with your communications and actions.

1. Work Environment . . . Is there a work environment situation that may effect your team's ability to complete work? Is there a business context documented in the business case that affects how to surmount obstacles? Are stakeholders involved in conflicting work? Has the sponsor apprised of a conflicting business initiative? Is there a big change required by the team, such as a new methodology like agile, a brand new team or a new type of complex project? How do tactics for succeeding at the next phase follow new guidance or priorities from the organization or enterprise?
2. Risks/Issues /Challenges . . . What are the new risks or issues to be addressed? Has the project team been involved in looking for risks? What did the project team identify? Who is affected? How must they be involved? How best to communicate to the effected?
3. Preparation for Resolution . . . What are the next decisions to be made so that the project team can progress? What information is needed? What type of session is needed to bring participants to agreement? How is the project team best involved in preparation for resolution? How do any resolution decisions need to be communicated? Who gets the communication? When are the next meetings where communications must be made? Who needs to attend? What are their interests? How can these interests be addressed in preparation for the meeting? What information needs to be collected to resolve the issue(s)? What questions need to be asked at the meeting? How does resolution need to fit in with the business case?
4. For any of the above categories, what needs to be said to motivate the project team to be successful? How do you say it? When do you say it (at what meeting)? What can you say to help them identify specific risks in this area?

Now apply the questioning technique to a particular example:

Situation: Your project is approaching the design phase. You ask leading questions of yourself (#1 and #2)  and determine that there is a risk from some key stakeholders not receiving recent leadership communication of organizational priority on customer-centric design. Alternately, if they did receive the recent communication, they may not agree with the ramifications. As a consequence, these stakeholders may not make themselves available for the amount of time needed in work sessions to understand the design and give feedback to improve its effectiveness with customers.

Think ahead: 

• Prepare messages to communicate need for stakeholder availability based on organizational leadership initiatives.
• Determine which communication vehicles should be used.
• Determine which meetings should be used to communicate this message and obtain feedback.
• Involve your project team to come up with ideas to meet this challenge. For example, the project team should come up with ideas to communicate through a variety of methods the need for availability in design work sessions. The team can also identify stakeholders who are pushing back on new design priorities or who have not received leadership communications about customer-centric design.

Notice how these tactics, built by asking leading questions, keep you ahead of the risks and engaging your project workforce to manage the situation in a more sophisticated manner. If you were only focused on project task management, you would run the risk of not starting to address the problem until much later and in a much less-effective reactive manner. Don't be that project manager.