Eye on the Workforce

A new survey reminds us of a problem that is so ubiquitous and so overpowering that we think there is nothing to be done and just suffer through it like morning traffic: The proliferation of email.

Anytime you look at your Inbox you can see courtesy copies of updates you have only a slight connection to, messages with more personal  content than business, conversations that are being sent to you for other's agendas, and all these covering up the few high-priority items that you'd love to find and deal with.

The survey respondents reported that:

• Only 1 in 4 is essential to work
• 14% were considered critically important 

You don't want email jams to slow responses you are awaiting. You don't want important communications between teams to be lost in a sea of trivia. You don't want your words of wisdom to be missed. So what can you do? Here are some recommendations.

In your emails:

• Write a Subject that is precise and effective
  Yes:  Action Required Before EOM
  No:  Please Read
  Never:  Record Keeping
• Avoid attachments when you can link to the latest version on a team site
• Make it useful to job, less conversational
• Eliminate extraneous content
• Break up long emails into bite-sized pieces with headings
• Organize well. Consider bullet points followed by support and background information
• The first sentence should be how it affects the reader or what action needs to take place
• "Action Requested"

In your project

• During training, distribute email tips for managing email tasks and follow-ups. For example, Outlook allows you to apply different colored flags to emails and then to insert reminders to complete. Include rules to automatically move emails from selected individuals to folders for easier processing. So many advanced features go unused.
• Provide guidance to reduce unnecessary emails and to keep emails for project-focused .

These may inspire you to come up with even better ideas for your own situation.

Is email proliferation a problem in your projects? What are you experiencing?

Over recent weeks in The Eye, I have been covering many topics that may have seemed unrelated, but now as a group point to an effective workforce management strategy. Here's a list of the drivers:

• The IT industry is at "full employment", making it difficult to hire the skills you need.
• IT organizations must develop skills from within to maintain workforce performance
• IT organizations must use informal training and social learning techniques an tools to train quickly  and cost-effectively
• There are many more high performers in the workforce than previously assumed

 Why You Should Care #1

You need workers with excellent skills to make your projects successful. The current environment is putting a constraint on your ability to field a project workforce with those skills. Some of the hardest skills for you to build are those of managers (including team leads) or of IT experts in rare skills who can train others.

 One solution to build these skills is through mentoring. Mentoring is a "informal training" that can be enabled by social tools and techniques available today. It allows an IT organization to quickly upgrade the skills of the many high performers ready to add more value to projects. While coaching is a technique suited for hard skills, mentoring is particularly suited for soft skills used by managers and leaders.

 In recent years mentoring has been growing up. For example, there is now at least one product (from Nobscot Corp) that matches mentors and protégés based on mutual professional interests similar to the services that match couples. You can read how one company used this product here (registration required).

 In any case a lot has been learned about what works and does not work in mentoring programs. See what Bloomberg and Harvard Business say here.

 Why You Should Care #2

You need some "you" time. That is, you need time away from the fires to enjoy being a protégé yourself, to do better in your career, especially to improve the types of projects you manage or to climb the career ladder. Don't wait for a program to be put in place if you do not have one, find a mentor!  Make sure you are ready as a protégé with these basics. There has never been a better time than now to position yourself for career advancement!

Learning is as important today to maintaining your workforce performance as it has ever been, and now we have better means of discovering what really works as new technology and techniques change the landscape. So you are keeping up with workplace learning technology, aren't you?

OK, you might have a couple of other items on your plate and need a briefing. Answer this multiple choice question to get started on this update.

Which of the following statements is/are true about high-impact learning organizations as compared with the national average?

(a) They have a higher training staff per worker
(b) They have a higher amount spent on training per worker
(c) They have a higher amounts of outsourcing

As an IT project manager, it is important for you to move toward best practices because IT is at "full employment", the implication being that it is much easier for IT workers to move to another position outside of your organization that they feel is better. For example, they may choose an organization that helps them better improve their skills. At full employment you will find it very difficult to hire the skills you need. It is more efficient to build the skills you need in your existing workforce .

So use best practices from those who have implemented them successfully: High-impact learning organizations. High-impact learning organizations have 

• Lower staff per worker than the national average
• Higher amount spent per worker
• Higher amounts of outsourcing for the training function

Use similar tactics in your organization - or project - to increase the impact of your training dollars.

• Reduce training staff by using informal/social learning . Tools and techniques have been developed for this type of decentralized organizational learning and they are very different from centralized training department approach. Many have been subjects of this blog and my articles on gantthead.
• Determine the best way to spend more on each worker. Consider that high-impact learning organizations  can train workers 20 hours annually. Leveraging informal trainers for decentralized real-time learning and making experts available via social media makes this easier.
• Use contract training groups, now with more justification, to meet your immediate skill-building needs.
• Use your gantthead network to see what others are doing. Find out what has worked and not worked for them.

For more information, read the Bersin Learning Factbook summary.

Previously in the Eye, we have covered the importance of carefully managing your best workers - the high performers. Recent research tells us that doing so may be more important than we thought. There is good news and bad news as a result of the study summarized in this National Public Radio story (listen or read, or check out the research abstract if you want more detail).

The Good News:  Many more people than expected are outstanding performers. Instead of what you would expect from a statistically normal distribution - a small percentage that is outstanding and most people simply average - perhaps 20% could be high performers. This was found across a variety of disciplines.

The Bad News:  Once we know that there are many more people far above average, that means more people must be below average. So there are many more people below average in your project than you previously thought possible. Or maybe you have already realized this must be true as you

• wait through delay after delay
• manage rework in project deliverables
• deal with poor team performance
• struggle with turnover due to individuals just not being able to work successfully in the project

More Good News:  You have more excellent workers than you perhaps thought and there are more out there that you can hire. Get past the belief that there are only a few gems waiting for your discovery. Search broadly to find the better selection of candidates who will be productive in your project.

More Bad News:  The performance appraisal system used by your organization may be forcing a normal distribution on its workforce, de-motivating some of your best people and even causing them to leave. Look for these diamonds in the rough and be their supporter. You may be able to turn their performance around - and eliminate their bitter influence on the rest of your workers.

How you deal with your own frustration is beyond the scope of this blog.

In any case, look for restrictions or constraints on the performance of the outstanding workers in your project. Not sure what these restrictions and constraints are? Guess who you should ask.

This final series installment adds more obstacle-hurdling tips, but these tips are interrelated to the first two, meaning you should establish all these tips in a single "package" in order to maximize teaming.

You think it is too difficult to do all this at once? Look, if teaming was easy, your workforce would engage in it faster, more often,  and more successfully. But they don't, so make it easy early so you have a smoother project later.

Team Obstacle #3:  Interdependent tasks cause problems between new team members early in teaming relationship. With no bonding to ease resolution, productivity may be slowed by confusion that is difficult to unwind.

• Let team define workflow and how to handle related tasks. Let them define their task-completion roles and relationships and roles. No assumptions! Make everything explicit. (This dovetails with tip for Obstacle #1 on mutual accountability. It also helps create a sense of identity, also connected with Obstacle #1.)
• Make sure you allow time clearly labeled for this definition. This activity forces very targeted team learning while it occurs - and when later updated. It enables team self-monitoring. (In other words, less for you to worry about.) With clear interrelationships, a low performer can be managed by the team before being escalated to higher levels of management. A bully or manipulator (see Obstacle #2) can be stifled by having little freedom to maneuver.

Team Obstacle #4:  Difficulty in communication between team members.

In today's workplace there is a need for an increasing production rate, but that is countered by dispersed teams who may even work in different time zones. The rapid communication necessary for productivity can be difficult. The solution promoted by Valentine and Edmonson in this  Harvard Business School working paper * (pdf) - which listed the obstacles  used in this series - was co-location in a shift environment. That is fine in the health care industry, but less possible in IT project management. How can you improve communications?

• Create distinct and flexible communication channels for teams. These can be standard team sites for sharing files and posting discussions, but let the teams the vehicles themselves. While a team customizes communication, members agree on collective needs and create a team identity, even if a team is made up of FTEs and contingent workers functioning in multiple locations and time zones. It even eases Obtacle #2 by removing the difficulty and stress of individual professionals interacting with each other the first time.

There were a lot of recommendations in this three-part series. Consider using a team checklist to ensure that teams complete these items. Team leads will appreciate the job aid.

Bonus Tip:  The first item on the list is to review the list and if anything cannot be done, escalate as a routine issue to get instructions.