Future of Work: New Working Styles for Project Managers

​The ubiquitous use of smartphones permeates not only personal lives, but professional ones as well. New working styles represent both challenges and opportunities. To help strike a balance, follow these tips.
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        • Consider relegating private email messages and social media to your phone and keeping your business collaboration your laptop or desktop computer. Limit that checking to just a few times a day but turning off all notifications.
    • Advocate for work-life balance by setting clear goals, schedules, and task requirements. Take note of team members who miss deadlines, and provide coaching, mentoring and remedial training to address the root cause.

​   • Improve communication by replacing newsletters and lengthy communications with shorter updates posted on internal messaging platforms. Encourage team members to participate and contribute to ongoing conversations. Recognize those who share tips, techniques and build trust among team members. Tag messages so participants can go back and find relevant information later.
        • Troubleshoot difficult situations by analyzing what team members do, feel, think and need when completing project tasks. Optimize work by looking for innovative ways to apply new technology to old problems. Flexible work environments and autonomy tend to encourage creative solutions to pressing deadlines. By regularly assessing what training and development can benefit your team and providing short self-paced training accessible on mobile devices, team members can fit learning and development into their busy schedules every day, not just a few times a year. Exploit the strengths and talents of team members by encouraging people to give short informal presentations demonstrating their expertise.
      • Provide your team with the tools to create training materials to onboard new team members. Simulations, demonstrations, games, stories, and online coaching from remote experts can help motivate team members to complete training programs designed to improve their skills, knowledge and on-the-job performance.  Use analytics to determine what solutions produce the best results for your team. Artificial intelligence solutions can help predict what content your organization needs and which skill gaps to fill first.

The key to adapting to a new working style involves keeping an open mind about trying new techniques to replace paper and pencil strategies. Digital transformation enables project teams to reduce the amount of transcription and interpretation required to make groups function. Engaging employees means more than running contests or distributing badges. Provide meaningful experiences tailored to each employee for the best results. Encourage employees to assess their performance by asking their peers about recent experiences. Feedback drives improvement that genuinely matters.
 
 

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