When I started working in Intraway, I was coming from a company in which I felt they were not taking the advantages of their employee’s talents, their competences, their synergy, or even the opportunities for maximizing the use of their human resources.
After a few weeks of working as part of the Intraway staff, I felt something totally different and that was the moment in which I asked myself what motivates me every day to go to work. Then I realized that in Intraway people matter.
This discovery was critical to set myself as main goal to try to contribute all the time to avoid discouragement in team members, who could consequently leave the company. This idea was strongly reinforced by the fact that I felt identified with the team´s values so, I didn´t want them to leave.
In that context and with that goal ahead, I started thinking about what kind of tool I could implement to have a team working tidily, respecting established processes, but above all, designing jobs with an equal workload. So, and with the Support Manager, we decided to create a board workload that ended up being the Control Monitor for every member of the team.
What is this “Control Monitor” about?
It is a fact that in many situations it is very difficult to know, identify and understand which team member has the highest or lowest workload in a given time. What makes this situation really complex is that we suppose this kind of things can be easily recognized and quantified through daily contact among managers-employees. Unfortunately, this assumption is absolutely false: if we don´t have objective indicators to rely on, the information we usually get in relation to what “other people do” can be limited by malicious comments, prejudice, conflicts of interest, favoritism, etc; just because we don´t have reliable information. These misperceptions about what “the others” do may be misleading when assessing self-performance, leading to believe that our workload is higher than the others´, with the negative consequences this can bring into the motivation and mood of the team.
Therefore, the idea was to design an accessible monitor to record and validate the real workload of the team in real time. It was necessary to design a helpful tool to analyze workload levels and to establish valid comparisons to promote cooperative attitudes among the team members.
This control monitor is about the weighting of support cases severities and their respective statues –Support, Development or Client-. Based on these parameters, it is possible to award a score for each case:
the most severe ones have higher priority and need more engagement as well as the cases that are in the support area.
Once severities and status points of each case are defined, this control monitor provides each member the opportunity of choosing cases in a visible and fair way to everyone, having the workload information of other members. This tool has the added value of storing statistics and general history to know the distribution of the workload not only in a given moment but also on a specific timeline.
Conclusion
Nowadays, the Control Monitor is permanently used and in a visible way in every work box to give everyone the opportunity to self-manage their daily tasks and also to promote cooperative work towards achieving the area objectives for general benefits.
Putting aside the statistical analysis of the implementation results of this tool –as it is not the purpose of this post- it is possible to assert that the consequences of using this tool have been the expected ones: an increased productivity and efficiency as a team as well as individually; clearer and more truthful information to make workload reports; a decrease in the time taken to resolve support cases and, of course, meeting the area goals. Above all, the tool implementation has strengthened the sense of belonging to all the team members, which is essential to keep the necessary human talent to reach the company goals. We are convinced this is the only way to meet the organizational goals.
