Team Productivity HABITS - Wrike · Because habits are done unconsciously, they use less brain...

Building High-Performance Teams One Habit at a Time

Strategies

Team Productivityfor Forming

HABITS

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Contents 2

Part 3: The Key Takeaways

CONTENTS

Why Should I Read About Productivity Habits?

Part 1: What are Habits?

Part 2: The 5 Strategies

Why should I read about productivity habits? 3


Are you a productivity champion? If your answer is, “No,” or, “I’m not sure...” do you WANT to be a champion? Then this ebook is for you.

You’ll find pages filled with useful strategies for both project manag-ers and team members who want to build their team into a high-per-formance unit.

To be honest, becoming a productivity champion isn’t complicated; people just don’t know how to go about it.

In reality, it’s simply a matter of choosing to work smart on a day-to-day basis. Ask successful people for the secret to their success, and they’ll tell you it’s borne from consistent daily habits. In fact, if you take a look at the typical daily routines of famous, productive think-ers and thought leaders such as Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, and Ludwig Van Beethoven you’ll realize just how important habits are for productivity.

Studies say that habits — or those routines we do without thinking — make up 45% of our day. That’s almost half of our lives dedicat-ed to habits. So it makes sense to form good ones, especially in re-gards to work.

Tesla’s Productivity Habit: Walks Scientist inventor Nikola Tesla worked everyday from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM, and still took the time to walk 8 to 10 miles every day. He wrote that walking around allowed him to incubate ideas until they gave birth to those “eureka” moments. Most famously, the idea for alternating currents came to him during his daily walk. While reciting poetry. How’s that for a productivity break?

Why Should I Read About Productivity Habits?

Why should I read about productivity habits? 4


This ebook will help you:

• Understand what habits are, how they’re formed, and why they’re so hard to change once established.

• Discover 5 strategies for creating productivity habits in your team.

• See how these strategies can be used in action, specifically by showing you how to improve project planning and progress reporting.

• Think more about your own team’s habits to decide what works and what doesn’t.

Let’s get started!

With that in mind, we put together five strategies for building pro-ductivity habits in your own team. The tips you’ll read are based on a combination of psychology, behavioral publications, popular books, and our own experience, and we’ve packaged them so you can test the ideas at your company immediately.

Part 1:

What are Habits?

Part 1: What are Habits? 6


What is the first thing you do when you sit at your desk in the morn-ing? For many of us it’s plug in the laptop, start it up, then enjoy a coffee while scanning the inbox for urgent messages. That’s an ex-ample of a habit. So is the way you comb your hair everyday. Or where you decide to place downloaded files on your hard drive.

1. Habits are routines done on autopilot

They’re actions so regularly repeated that they become an ingrained behavior. And more importantly, they’re pretty much done uncon-sciously.

We rely on habits and routines to get through our day so that we don’t have to think about every single decision. Imagine if each morning you had to decide which highway lane to take on the way to work. That decision is most likely already a habit because you’ve made the choice over and over. Autopilot kicks in (middle lane, ev-ery time) - no thinking required. Convenient, right?

2. Habits reserve your creative energy for problem solving

Because habits are done unconsciously, they use less brain power. You don’t analyze why your left leg goes into your pants first, you just do it. And that’s a good thing because this allows us to reserve our creative energies for when they’re most needed – for the tasks that involve problem solving. Things like: dreaming up new processes,

programming code, writing sales letters, or answering a custom-er’s question. These are all tasks that rely heavily on creativity and on being conscious about your actions and decisions.

3. Habits take time to build

Habits are not created overnight. You’d be surprised by how much work your brain does to turn a repetitive action into an ingrained habit. Rewiring your brain is not only a matter of willpower, it in-volves time and repetition. According to researchers, getting a new habit to stick requires an average of 66 days, or roughly 2 months. And if the new behavior is particularly complex, it may take up to 8 months.

What Is A Habit?

You might be thinking, “Eight months?! I don’t have that kind of time. I need my team to practice new habits NOW!”

Unfortunately, you’re out of luck. Habits take this long to move from behavior to ingrained action because the human mind is natural-ly resistant to change.

The graph shows the classic psychological response to change. People will typically react negatively at first: moving through denial, anger, confusion, depression, and finally crisis. But right after that

The Reluctance to Change

Part 1: What are Habits? 7


Quick Tip: Focus on the New

Don’t try to analyze and fix the old bad habits. Instead, focus on creating new patterns. This will minimize conflict and negativity during the entire process.

comes acceptance of the change, which leads to new confidence and raises the individual’s self-esteem.

People resist change for many reasons. Often it stems from fear: fear of the unknown (why change when the familiar way has worked for years?), or alongside this, a fear of incompetency – that the change will require new skills the person does not possess. There may be concerns that the end results won’t be worth the effort. Or there could be anxiety about change making an individual’s job obsolete.

Another source of resistance comes from a lack of communication. If management doesn’t explain why a change needs to be intro-duced at all, and if team members aren’t consulted for their opin-ions, brick walls will go up and change is brought to a standstill.

The long and short of it is: if you’re on a mission to make your team more productive, communicate the reasons for change, quell their fears, and keep at it for at least two months. Patiently move your team away from denial and anger until they get to ac-ceptance and new confidence. It takes time, but it’ll be worth it.

Time

Denial Anger

Confusion

Depression

Crisis

Acceptance

New confidence

Self-

este

em

Part 2:

The 5 Strategies For Creating New Productivity Habits in Your Team

Part 2: The 5 Strategies. Lead By Example 9


Strategy 1: Lead By ExampleThe easiest and fastest way to form a new productivity habit in your team is to lead by example. Not “do as I say,” but “do as I do.” Author and speaker Scott Berkun nailed it in our quote below. Leadership is about integrity: walking the walk, not just talking the talk. And do-ing it even when you think no one is watching you.

By actively demonstrating how you want things done, you speed up the adoption process. You don’t even have to be a team lead-er to implement this. Anyone within the team who demonstrates a successful new behavior or a more effective process can influ-ence others to get onboard the practice.

We have a productivity proverb which we follow wholeheartedly at Wrike. It boils down to: Show, don’t tell; or better yet, involve, don’t lecture. You need to show the team what behavior is expected and then involve them in perfecting it.

Leadership Comes from Integrity

“Leadership comes from integrity – that you do whatever you ask others to do. Just by providing a good example makes it possible for other people to see bet-ter ways to do things.” – Scott Berkun, author of The Art of Project Management



Let’s make this strategy more concrete using Wrike to demonstrate one habit you can lead your team in: weekly planning. A major work barrier we hear about from customers is their lack of visibility into a project. One solution is to organize your work into short iterations -- typically one week long -- and hold status meetings to synchronize with team members. The weekly cadence is good because it’s long enough so that real work can be accomplished, but short enough so that tasks can be shifted and courses adjusted if something’s not working. It also allows you to maintain business velocity, since every week you’re making sure things get done.

For that weekly meeting, build an agenda that lists everyone’s high-priority tasks for the week. Start with your own tasks, of course. Then encourage your team to do the same. If you lead, your team-mates will follow suit.

Here are tips to improve your weekly meeting agenda:

• Create a folder called “Weekly Plans.” Inside it, create subfolders for each month (01Jan, 02Feb, 03Mar, 04Apr, etc.) and within each month, create weekly subfolders (week 1, week 2, etc.).

• Inside of the current week’s folder, create 5 tasks for yourself and include as much detail as possible. Remember that those 5 tasks should be: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-

In Action: Weekly Planning



bound (also known as S.M.A.R.T. criteria, made famous by man-agement guru Peter Drucker).

• For each of your tasks, attach all relevant files and outside links so the team has a complete picture of your project. You can easily attach files from your desktop, Box, Dropbox, or Google Drive.

If you keep at it to show how useful your new habit is, pretty soon everyone will follow your lead, listing their own weekly priorities and providing the entire organization with a clear picture of their workload and project contributions.

Steve Jobs: On Leading by Example

“A leader leads by example, whether he intends to or not.”– Steve Jobs, Apple CEO

By integrating his personal values into his business decisions, Steve Jobs motivated his teams to do as he did: embrace failure, live by intuition, and follow passion.

Part 2: The 5 Strategies. Share the Power to Change (“Peer Pressure”) 12


Strategy 2: Share the Power to Change (“Peer Pressure”)While leading by example is an essential start, it won’t always be enough to motivate your team. You will need the additional sup-port that a core group of power users can supply.

The key is to find people within your team who are already produc-tivity champions and give them a way to share their best practices with the rest of your team. This core group can then spread the new habits through positive “peer pressure.”

Here are three tips that may be useful in finding your core group of power users:

1. Pinpoint those team members who are: more productivity-ori-ented than others, enthusiastic about social tools, and comfort-able with new technology.

2. Ask them to share their top productivity habits. Find common practices and document them.

3. Give them the right tools and channels to spread awareness, such as: teaching new productivity hacks during weekly status meet-ings, or writing an internal blog or Wiki on productivity. These channels should help best practices spread through your whole organization.

Avanade: The Power of Power Users

This “peer pressure” method is how Avanade, a global consulting company with over 17,000 employees, moved from email collaboration to an enterprise so-cial network. They started by involving C-level executives then recruiting social evangelists internally to educate the rest of the company. End result: they now collaborate entirely through their chosen social network.

Part 2: The 5 Strategies. Share the Power to Change (“Peer Pressure”) 13


One way that positive “peer pressure” can come in handy is when organizing and tagging tasks that your team handles. If one person leads by example and influences the power users to follow suit, the rest of the team will follow.

As a refresher, you can use Wrike folders as tags by dragging and dropping them onto tasks or by clicking the + sign under the task title. It doesn’t change the task’s original location but merely adds another location to it. (You can include tasks – and folders – in many folders.)

For example our very own customer success team tags every in-coming ticket with a minimum of four tags: the problem platform (iOS, Android, Desktop), the priority level, the team region, and the ticket status (new, in progress, review, completed).

Even our marketing group uses a minimum of three tags per task: the team involved (content, PR, analytics, SEO, lead gen), the chan-nel where the deliverable appears (blog, website, monthly report, etc.) and the deadline (April, week 5, Q2, etc). Action item: tag your weekly items as you see fit. Then begin tagging the tasks of team members as well. When they begin asking what the tags are for, explain the system to them and get them on your side. They will soon follow and influence other team members.

In Action: Using Specific Folder Tags for Every Task

Part 2: The 5 Strategies. Use Small Wins to Achieve Big Victories 14


Strategy 3: Use Small Wins to Achieve Big VictoriesYou can propagate new habits in one of two ways:

1. Roll it out to a core group of power users, who then go out and spread the new habits to their colleagues (see Strategy #2), or

2. Break the habit into small, successive steps leading to a bigger whole – something known as small wins. This works because splitting larger goals into bite-size pieces allows you to achieve small victories. It’s psychological. Receiving the reward creates the potent “happiness” chemical Dopamine in your brain – some-thing so powerful that the brain craves more. Thus, having those small wins can actually motivate your people to keep on going until the larger goal is accomplished.

Splitting a large project into bite-sized chunks makes the work more manageable and increases team productivity. And we have just the feature to do just that: it’s called subtasks. And subtasks are the epitome of small wins.

Instead of assigning a host of people to work on one large task (and risk not getting anything done because everyone’s waiting for someone else to take the lead), break down each responsibility

In Action: Break Your Tasks into Subtasks

into a subtask and assign each subtask to only one person. Farm out these smaller assignments in order to divide the load and clear up areas of responsibility. Then see how satisfying it is to watch the green meter fill up as those subtasks get completed. Awesome, right?

Part 2: The 5 Strategies. Motivate 15


Strategy 4: MotivateIf you want to change habits, you need to involve both the rational and emotional sides of a person. You can appeal to the rational side all you want by quoting statistical increases in productivity and number of hours saved on a project, but if you’re not able to appeal to the emotional side of your team members you won’t gain enough momentum for the habit to take root.

For example: knowing you need to send a Mother’s Day card every year is a rational thing. But it’s different from wanting to send it out of gratitude for your mother’s guidance. The rational side will show you the direction to the goal, but the emotional side will provide the horsepower to get there.

Motivating your team to make a change can be as simple as giv-ing them incentives to practice their new habits more frequently. Or you could gamify the entire process and turn the new habit into a competition. Give out fun rewards or prizes for accomplish-ing specific goals. Decide what will work for your team and motivate the change.

In our head office, our CEO sent out an office-wide memo asking us to wash our own dishes. But there were still unwashed plates in the sink every now and then. It wasn’t until someone printed out a photo of a grandmother in an apron and taped it to the wall above the sink that people got the point. The caption under the photo

read: “She doesn’t work here. Wash what you use!” We looked. We laughed. And we were inspired to clean up after ourselves.

Driving Change: Like Riding an Elephant

In the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, authors Chip and Dan Heath say that to drive change, you need to do three things: (1) direct the rider (rational side), (2) motivate the elephant (emotional side) and (3) shape the path (external environment).

Part 2: The 5 Strategies. Motivate 16


In Action: Using Reports to Check Momentum While you can motivate the team using rewards both tangible (re-ceiving free basketball game tickets) and intangible (proclaimed “customer service superhero”), there is still the question of moni-toring who’s actually putting the habits into practice.

Here’s where you can maximize Wrike’s reports feature.

You can run reports on who has completed the most tasks in the last week/month, who has created the most tasks, who has worked the most hours, or even who has the largest load. There are many more options in the Reports menu which you can use to monitor the team’s velocity and performance. Make use of them!

Zappos: Motivating via Happiness

Zappos is famous for its mantra that creating happy employees and clients is good for business. For in-stance, their finance department holds a “Random Acts of Kindness” parade in the office every week that culminates in giving out awards to employees. This action creates a positive vibe that resonates far beyond the walls of the finance division. See the Youtube video talking about their parade.

Part 2: The 5 Strategies. Blend the New with the Old 17


Strategy 5: Blend the New with the OldThe fifth and final strategy makes use of the old adage: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

If an existing habit in your team is working, keep it! Or even better, leverage it when adopting new habits. You could blend new and old practices in your team to make adoption of new habits quicker and still feel familiar to everyone.

Replacing an old habit with a new one requires a lot of willpower and energy. You will inevitably face an internal battle deciding which behavior will dominate. Ideally the new habit will take over and be automatic, lessening the need for a great amount of willpower. But why spend that much energy replacing an old habit, when you can leverage it instead?

A big tip: connect a specific situation – a routine you’re used to – with the new habit. Say for example, you’re trying to learn how to use Wrike, and are more used to managing projects by email: one way to merge the old with the new is to utilize our smart email in-

In Action: Leveraging Email to Get People Used to Project Management Software

tegrations to ease your team into Wrike. Wrike has a native email integration as well as a Google gadget, which can be used to create tasks in Wrike directly from your email inbox.

If you use any one of these integrations, you’re linking the new hab-it (using Wrike) onto another routine action you have in your day (checking email). Now repeat this sequence every day to get into the good habit of using Wrike.

Part 2: The 5 Strategies. Blend the New with the Old 18


With the email integration, you’ll find that there is a full range of ac-tions available that access Wrike’s rich functionality:

• You can create a task in Wrike from the email.

• You can reply to the email in order to leave a comment on the task.

• You can change a task status, edit the title, include it in other fold-ers, update the description, reschedule it, or set it as backlogged.

• You can also assign and unassign people to the task.

This is just one example of a simple way your team can learn to adopt a new set of practices, while keeping a foot in their old comfort zones.

The Key Takeaways

The Key Takeaways 20


The Key Takeaways

Because we all want our teams to be successful, we’ve got to be able to introduce productivity habits that make it easier to get work done together. And if you really want these new habits to stick, you have to actively bypass that natural resistance to change.

The key takeaways – that I want you to put into practice today and never forget! – are those five strategies we’ve just covered:

1. Lead by example in practicing new habits.

2. Identify productivity champions who can spread the new habits. Positively peer pressure the rest.

3. Celebrate small wins so you can achieve bigger victories.

4. Motivate the entire organization to take up the new habits.

5. Leverage old habits when introducing new ones in order to keep things familiar.

We’re all looking forward to hearing your success stories in the future! Good luck!

Brian Tracy on Success and Habits

“Successful people are simply those with successful habits.”– Brian Tracy, author and motivational speaker

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