Day-to-day management: some tips and best practices

Today’s managers are facing many issues. They must must have an extraordinary adaptation capacity in order to be able to answer any situation (like a pandemic forcing everyone to work remotely). Managers must build a toolbox which will help them achieve their goals and lead them towards success. In this article, you will find 9 issues faced by managers and tools and methods to face them.

Issue #1: Communication

The most important issue within a team is communication. Its goal is to:

• Broadcast a company’s strategic issues
• Ensure strategic coherence within your team
• Share messages linked to your own management and objectives
• Communicate the right message at the right time
• Renew the dialogue, which will favor proximity and collaboration

There can only be transformation with a global vision of your activities. That is why nowadays, communicating efficiently takes a new turn. With the development of remote working, everyone is kind of forced to find new tools to interact with their teammates. Then, you must succeed in making your interactions with your colleagues easier:

• Put in place a collaborative communication. For instance, in Microsoft Teams or Slack, create dedicated communication channels for each project in which your co-workers will be able to exchange more rapidly in real time. In these channels, you will be able to create a shared space where everyone will find any documents linked to the project. Access to updated information will be facilitated for everybody.
• Create meeting reports to verify everyone’s workload, sum up decisions that were taken and clearly formulate expectations

Having formal meetings is an essential tool to manage communication with your teams. Regularly plan dedicated team meetings for your projects (whether they are face-to-face or remote). Furthermore, do individual meetings with your co-workers.

Informal communication is very important as well:

• Take coffee machine breaks, even virtual ones, to interact daily about everything and anything and speak openly.
• Use the lunch break to talk with the members of your team and get to know them better
• Organize cocktail parties to encourage spontaneous communication and strengthen the bonds of your team.

Issue #3: Prioritization and planification

To complete your projects, you should plan and prioritize your tasks. That will help you know which missions must be completed first depending on their level of priority or urgency. Having an optimal organization is essential for a manager in order to complete their project in time with their team.

Eisenhower matrix, Gantt’s diagram or Kanban, there are several methods which can help you. By clicking here, you can find all prioritization methods we have listed depending different ways of daily functionment. Those matrixes can be found in project management tools such as Beesy, Asana or Wrike/

Combine your organization and prioritization matrix with a to-do list with your calendar and you’ll become the king of organization! You will integrate all your tools with each other and will never loose useless time juggling between different platforms.

Issue #4: Reportings

Reporting tools are essentials to your everyday life. They help you manage your activities and help your take the right decisions.

Build your reports with your team and share them with your co-workers. Each individual must be able to access a 360° vision of your project in real time. Reporting tools should be used as a mean of motivation to your teams and not be perceived as a mean of constant watching.

Several types of reports exist. You can use:

• Dedicated reports for each project to follow all your activities
• A visual dashboard which will evaluate the general progression of your project
• A checklist presenting all the tasks that were created and to whom each one of them was assigned as well as their deadline

Issue #5: Taking care and being attentive of your team

To have a performing and motivated team, you should take care of it. Be attentive to your employees. To improve everyone’s professional life, you should know their opinion, their thoughts.

To create a mutual trust bound and develop well-being at work you can:

• Regularly create feedback forms on your management style, your organization or the general atmosphere (Google Forms).
• Set up recurring one-to-one meetings with each person.
• Create opinion polls (SurveyMonkey)
• Each week, clear time in your schedule in order to be available. Your co-workers should be able to get ea to share their problems and opinions.
• Regularly plan individual or collective meetings to prevent any conflict. Everyone can than express themselves on subjects they would like to address, but also their issues and sources of stress, etc.

Issue #7: Team Cohesion

With a good team cohesion, you will increase your ability to go faster and further. With the right team spirit, you will be able to lift mountains. That is why your teammates should get to know each other and trust each other. By knowing each person’s domain of expertise, the members of your team will be able to assign tasks to each other depending on everyone’s skiils. Things will move faster and nobody will stay blocked on a specific mission anymore because of a lack of skill. Here are our tips to encourage team cohesion:

• Do team building exercises so that temmates get to know each other, develop a bound of trust and find out domain of expertise and skills of each other
• Build a common vision. Give a direction to your team. To do that, regularly gather everyone so that each person can suggest and submit ideas. Then, you will be able to collectively validate decisions and build the same vision.
• Define the values of your team with rules and bearings, which will improve cohesion team and coherence.
• Use your company’s social media to make your co-workers interact with each other and create debates.
• Organize best practices and tips sessions on common topics for everyone

Furthermore, within a team, each person has a different personality. Not everybody reacts the same way to a discussion. You should then find the right type of communication that suits everyone. For instance, you can:

• Have your team take a personality test. This will determine each person’s ideal method of communication. With different generations meeting on the labor market, you may face difficulties handling intergenerational management. Click here to find out tips for a successful intergenerational management.
• Identify the type of management that will be adapted to each person.