Effective Team Management Tips For Online Businesses

An effective team management requires your team to conduct regular one on one sessions with them. When a new assistant joins our business, they get their own file and they'll have they'll have copies of all of the documents they signed when they first came on board. They'll also have a series of one on one sheets.

On the one on one sheet will be the date, who's attending, and when the last meeting was. Then I start off with, this is a real key one, I like this. You always ask them the same question, it doesn't matter what question it is but you open with the same question every time. How are you or something like that. It can be your own spin on it but effectively what you want to do is have a question that's like your baseline.

You ask them on a regular basis, how are you? Good, good, good, average. Bing! I know something is up. Because every time, looking through my past one on ones, they're always good, good, good, average. Things aren't going so well. That for me is a red flag in virtual team management. Then I can try and find out, well, what's going on? How can I help, how can I help the situation? So you always start with a question that is the same question every time.

For the first ten minutes they'll talk about whatever they want to talk about and then I'll just make any notes. The important things about a one on one, it's all about asking questions, listening effectively and then taking notes. It's very easy with a virtual assistant to take notes because obviously they're on Skype and they can't necessarily see you taking notes. Even with the one on ones in the office, I'll sit there and I'll scribble down notes. That's just my way of remembering. If I try and remember everything, I just don't remember it, so I use the documentation. So one on ones are all about writing effective notes.

Then I'll ask them what it is they've been working on over the past few weeks. I'll get them to bullet point everything that they've been working on. What things come to mind? Then we talk about what do you like, what do you not like? Then they'll tell you about tasks. One of my assistants had been doing a task a little while ago where he was watching all of our past workshops and he would find the gold, the little nuggets in our workshops. He was creating a time code, where he'd say, a nugget starts here, a nugget ends here.

Then we pass that off to our video assistant and then he cuts those out and then they end up going on to YouTube and end up being promotional pieces. In our last one on one, my assistant had said, look, I'm not enjoying that as much anymore, so now what are we doing? We're in the process of assigning it over to another assistant because it will be new for her. I think with any job, there is always going to be something that you don't enjoy. You do need to help them to understand there may be tasks and roles in their job that they're not necessarily going to enjoy, if it's part of their core job.

But I also want to make sure that they enjoy coming to work. If they're doing a repetitive task that they're not enjoying, then I'm happy to put systems in place. I'm all about systems in doing effective team management, where I want my guys to think in terms of, if I could get this outsourced for less, then Dave's given me the approval to go ahead, create a system and then go get someone to outsource and do it. So I encourage my guys, they do the task a few times, they learn it, they document it. If you imagine the learning procedure or teaching procedure, the final step is teaching someone else and that's what we're doing at that point, then it gets passed on to someone else unless it's part of their core competencies.

We'll also ask them are there any other projects that they'd like to be working on? We have regular team meetings where people get a chance to talk about what it is that they're working on, so they know what everybody else is working on. I'll also have an opportunity to say what I'm working on, so they know what the business is doing. Then they might think, oh, I want to be more involved in this particular industry blog type side project we're doing. Or maybe I want to be involved in the SEO component or the trading part of my business and then they can let me know where they would like to work.

The idea of the last few minutes of the one on one is to ask them what skills would you like to develop as well? Regular one on ones can be a very effective way of effective team management today.