Managing a team is never easy. However, there are some things you can do to get the most out of your staff.
Today, I want to show you how you can use Trello to manage all of the job responsibilities, all the job tasks for your team, regardless of how many employees are part of your organization. Recently, I was speaking with Michael Timms of Avail Leadership.
Michael is the expert when it comes to succession planning and getting the most out of your team. He shared with me this fantastic idea of how to use Trello to manage all of your staff's responsibilities.
Job Roles
Now, when we talk about responsibilities, we're not talking about daily to-dos. No, we're talking about things like job roles or the types of things that you might find on a job description.
Let me show you what I've got set up here in my Trello sample board. In this example, I've got a team that consists of four individuals, or a department that consists of four individuals.
At the top, I've got one list for each job title. Here you see I've got an Operations Manager, Business Analyst, Quality Control Coordinator, and an Administrative Assistant.
Headshots
Below the very first card in each of these lists is the individual that has that title. Here we have Sue, Joe, Phil, and Diane.
I highly recommend that you use headshots of your team or your staff when you're creating such a board in Trello. It makes it much easier to know what you're talking about and as you're moving cards around, to have that picture, to have that visual in front of you.
Now, below the headshot, we have a number of job roles. These are the responsibilities of these individuals.
As I said before, these are the types of things that you might include in a job description. What are they responsible for on a day-to-day or weekly basis?
As Michael shared with me, to get the most out of your team, you want your staff to play to their strengths. You don't want them to just fulfill the assignment that they were perhaps hired for, but if they are especially skilled in a particular area, perhaps they can take on someone else's role as well.
For example, let's take a look at our Operations Manager. Let's say that Joe has a background in HR, training, and recruitment.
This is something that he loves to do, and he's got experience in it, whereas Sue, this is something that she doesn't particularly like; it actually eats up too much of her time. So even though recruitment and training are part of her responsibilities, what we can do is take this card and drag it over into Joe's list.
Now, this is something that is under Joe's area of responsibility. But we don't want to stop there.
You may notice a few other things about this particular Trello board. You will notice that each and every card actually has an hours value labeled underneath it.
Weekly Hours
These are the estimated number of weekly hours that they are using on those particular tasks. We have just added 2.5 additional hours to Joe's responsibilities here.
So now we may want to look at whether there is something else on Joe's list that maybe Phil, Diane, or even Sue is better suited for. We want our teams to be playing to their strengths whenever possible.
Another thing that you will notice here on the Trello board is that I have a few different cards that have different labels or different colors associated with them as well. This can be very helpful if there are certain themes you want to group together as you're looking at your different employees and the different tasks that they do on a regular basis.
Filtering Tasks
In this example, I have a red label which stands for quality-related tasks, and I also have a green label which stands for reporting activities. Trello makes it really easy to filter out these labels.
Let's say, for example, I want to see all of the reporting tasks among my team. All I have to do is select reporting, and now I have a quick look at all of the tasks and who has those tasks that are related to reporting.
Maybe I want to turn reporting off and I want to look at quality. I want to see who's got the most quality-related tasks.
It's probably not surprising that our Quality Control Coordinator has the most quality-related tasks here. But are there things that perhaps he should also be adding to his list, or are there certain things here that can be deferred or assigned to someone else as part of their job responsibilities as well?
Advantages of Trello
Let me turn that filter off for a moment and show you a few more of the advantages of setting up a Trello board like this. You will notice that the front of the cards is relatively short, and that's on purpose.
We don't want to be dealing with full paragraphs on the front of the card. It's hard to scan, it's hard to read the job descriptions or those job tasks as we're reviewing this board.
But the great thing about Trello is that if we click on that card, within the card we can add a detailed and full description of these job responsibilities if we like. We can even add attachments or links to other websites or other documents which might pertain to this particular task.
Creating a Team Board
You can keep the front of your card nice and simple, nice and clean, and then add as many further details as you like within that card as well. Take a look at creating an HR staff or a team board like this for all of the employees within your organization.
Or maybe you want to test this out with just one department or one area of your company. It's a great way to get everyone on the same page.
Just before I wrap up, I want to highlight one last thing. Let's say, for example, Phil decides to leave the organization.
What happens in most organizations? Often, they go back to the last job description or the last job posting that they had.
But with the Trello board, these are Phil's actual current job responsibilities. So maybe this is where we want to generate that job posting or that job description from.
Conclusion
It's another one of the advantages of having the title as the list and then the individual as the first card. We hire someone new or bring someone new into the organization, and then the process repeats itself.
It's dynamic. We might want to change and adjust some of the cards, some of the job responsibilities throughout the team.
I'd love to hear from you. What do you think about having a board to manage all of your team's job responsibilities?
Have you created something like this yourself? I'd love to hear your questions and comments down below.
I also want to give a big thanks to Michael Timms for providing the suggestion. I'm also going to provide a link to Michael's original article, which goes into even more detail about this process.
You can find that in the description below. Thank you again for watching.
I encourage you to subscribe right here to the Simpletivity YouTube channel. Give this video a like, and of course, I'd love to hear your comments down below.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
