Roles, responsibilities and processes are crucial for your effectiveness

They allow each team member to know where he fits into the organisation, where at the same time the team as a whole knows what they can expect from each individual team member. It's not about squeezing people into boxes, it's about having clear agreements on who does what. Processes are not mended as barriers. They are intended to give confidence to all people who are concerned by the process and to structure their communications.

How resilient is your team?

The only nice thing about flu epidemics is that they reveal how resilient your processes are regarding sudden sick leaves. What happens if one or more employees suddenly call in sick? To what extent does this affect your running operations?

Assess your resilience

Here are some simple things you would like to check with a quick assessment of your situation. Don't make it too complicated and focus on the most essential processes and roles.

Establish a matrix, with the main roles on one axis, the main steps of the critical process on the other axis. Now fill in the names of your team members on the grid. Keep it simple! Something like this.

Navigate through your grid and at each critical step, ask yourself:

If this person falls out, is there someone else who can immediately take over (part of) his or here role?
If this is not the case, how critical is this fall out for the process?
How much time can we do without the role being fulfilled? After how many days does it starts to get critical?

Make an action plan

Having made this assessment, you will have a good overview of the hot spots you will have to tackle. Again, don't try to fix them all, but concentrate on those which are really critical. Identify the kind of measures you could take to fall back on for the most critical steps. Take timing into account and work with timeframes of one day, two days, one week, one month. Or use any other granularity of timeframe which would be relevant for your activity.

Participation and communication!

Having made this plan will not help you as such. Make sure that all your team members are aligned on the solutions you have developed. Share your draft with your team at the next team meeting, let them challenge it, take into account their input before finalising it. Make it available to all, easy to find and retrieve. Make sure you will reassess your plan on a regular basis.

One more thing...

Don't forget to include yourself as a team manager and as the person who has to ensure the smooth running of these processes. And if you do forget, don't get sick!

Liked this idea?

Let's get face to face and talk about other things we could do together to improve your team's effectiveness.

How resilient is your team against sudden sick leaves?