Do you ever feel your office is like a runaway train, headed downhill with a curve up-ahead, speed is building and you need to do something fast, but don’t whether you can stop it or if you should just jump off before it flies off the tracks and crashes? We experienced just this very thing in our office. It took awhile to really figure out what was causing it. The Holiday season had just passed and the office had been closed for several days, some of the staff members had taken vacation time and it seemed that we just had forgotten how to function as a team. Everyone was trying to play the catch-up game and we were out-of-sync with each other. We needed to regroup our team and did so using the Three Rs to get things back on track, “reassess, regroup, redirect.
The “Reassess” part is best done by the manager or business owner by talking individually with each staff member to find out what they felt was working and what was not. Ask the same questions of each member so that you can get specifics and more depth to what the heart of the derailing was caused by. Each person sees things a bit differently depending on what they do in the office. The receptionist will see things much differently than the office manager or owner, but all views are vitally important in seeing the big picture. When talking to each person ask what their observations are, NOT, their opinions about how the team is functioning or lack of function. Write down what the observations are and I bet you will find they are pretty similar for the most part. Once you have your list it is time to come up with possible solutions to get things running smoothly again.
In our case we called an office meeting and went over the issues that were on our list. We came up with some new ideas to try to solve some of the problems and found that we needed to re-implement some policies that we had let slip under the radar. As we discussed these things we all felt a surge of new excitement about our office and what we do there. We set a couple of new goals and gave ourselves deadlines as to when we would complete them. It was great, we changed the direction we were going. We were no longer on a runaway train, we were back on track and heading up hill again. Everyone felt good as we ended our meeting and we were all excited about our new goals and ready to get started on them.
It was interesting though, the week following our regroup/redirect meeting was one of those weeks from “%$&#” (I am sure you have been there). It was amazing, our team’s attitude was great. We laughed at the end of the first crazy day, thinking now way could tomorrow be worse (we found that we will never say that again, because it was). Even with all that this “bad” week brought we still managed to meet one of the goals we set. When Friday came we all were very glad for the weekend break, but not one of us dreaded the thought of coming back on Monday because we were a team with a fresh vision again heading in a positive direction.
7/9/12
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