atimirage, Author at ATI Mirage

Keeping Yourself Accountable

There is so much value in building a culture of accountability within ourselves.

On a daily basis we are accountable for someone or something. For example, your peers at work, your job, paying bills, bringing up your children, family responsibility… the list goes on. With more demand and expectations on us than ever before how do we stay on track? How do we keep accountable for our actions and not be distracted or led astray from what’s important?

Here are our top 3 tips for keeping yourself accountable

1. Respect time and tasks with outcomes.

We all have the same amount of time in a day. So how do some people glide through life and others feel like they are floundering? The key is how they spend their time. Imagine every minute of the day was a ten dollar note – by the end of each day do you spend it on what you want or do you find yourself lining other people’s pockets? Being accountable is looking at how we are spending our time. Do we fill it up with meaningless time-filler tasks or do we spend it working towards what we want to achieve?

In life there must be balance, so look at where you’re spending your time and if the pendulum swings too far one way, look at balancing things out. For example are you stressed out because you spend so much time completing tasks for everyone else you miss out on getting your own stuff done? If so, look at taking 1 hour of the day (split in 15mins bursts if that’s easier for you) doing something for yourself. Respect the time that is yours to keep yourself accountable.

2. Use technology to support you.

When we are busy, on the go all the time we can store everything in our short-term memory. Like a computer our short term memory can only hold so much before it’s overloaded. While technology can be a major reason for distraction, it can also provide some practical tools to help prioritise. There are plenty of apps out there which create lists, reminders and progress trackers, such as Planner or Trello.

Consider using your 1 hour a day for yourself to research the best apps out there that will work for you. Using visual activity-based technology can keep you accountable to achieve those daily goals.

3. Reward yourself for more than a second.

So, what happens when you deliver on a promise you made yourself? Or when you succeed on a task you’re accountable for? Do you just move straight on to the next one? Stop! Take some time to bask in the glory of all you’ve achieved. Take some time to celebrate your success. You could do that by taking a lunch break, phoning a friend or just getting up from your desk to get some fresh air.

It’s so easy to ignore the celebration part of accountability with all you have to get done. Being accountable takes hard work and dedication so celebrate your wins – even the small ones.

Success in anything comes from making it a priority. It’s down to you to make the conscious effort in mastering your own accountability. Once you do it can be a very rewarding experience.

We at ATI-Mirage can help. Join us for our next workshops:

Tame your Inbox

Time Management and Personal Productivity

Time Management Boost your Productivity

Manage Stress Build Resilience

Microsoft Teams

Develop your Emotional Intelligence

Microsoft Outlook

3 Tips to create a great team culture

Culture can be created by choice. So start by deciding what culture you want to create in your workplace. Get this right and you can have the best team, increased staff retention and happier customers. This can lead to organisational growth.

So, the question we need to ask is “how do we create the right culture?” While you might have some initial ideas, culture-building is a team effort, and should be treated as a team effort.

So where do we start?

Here are our top 3 starting points for developing your team culture.

1. Start with “why” in everything you do

As Simon Sinek explains in his book “Start With Why” – it’s not enough these days to only know what you do and how you do it. People are motivated by why you do it. Values form the basis for understanding the core business beliefs and passion. So, use this as a starting point for getting to your why.

With your team collaboratively create a why statement. Ask them: What are our values and what are we passionate about? Why does the business exist? Why is our team important to the business? Why do you enjoy working in the team?

Having a clear why statement provides an intrinsic call to action and provides purpose to the organisation’s services. It’s human nature to want to feel part of something bigger with a sense of community. The why statement acts as an anchor, stabilising a team to focus on a greater commitment.

2. Give employees time to recharge and de-stress

As culture is created by choice, be aware of the choices you’re making and how they influence your team. If you have a habit of working long hours, never taking a lunch break and operating under stressful conditions this will flow on to the team.

Working long hours and rarely taking breaks may boost results in the short-term but can be damaging in the long-term. Stress in teams creates a negative environment leading to employees growing sick, tired, and unmotivated.

Establish ways to create intrinsic incentives and other creative solutions to let employees recharge and renew their creativity. For example, ensure each staff member steps away from their desk to take a lunch break. Or hold meditation sessions in the boardroom on a Friday. It’s even more common now for organisations to allow employees to work from home or flex their hours outside of the 9 to 5. By giving employees more flexibility and an environment to recharge you’ll likely find better work results with the team achieving more. Not only does it help the success of the organisation, but it is also the organisation’s responsibility to look after its employees!

3. Give everyone the opportunity to work directly with customers.

To truly develop a great team culture means understanding the impact each position has on the customer – the reason your business exists! This needs to be experienced to be understood. Provide the opportunity for team members to work on the front line for a day or two. Getting direct lived experience with customers provides insight as to how the team member’s work impacts customer service levels.

Learning how to better serve your customers connects directly with accountability in teams. It increases collective knowledge and allows the opportunity to address the biggest pain points. When everyone works together to provide better service it leads to a positive team culture of responsibility, to be the best they can be.

Team culture is something to nurture, internally and externally. Think through all efforts to influence and grow your team culture. If the strategy considers both the happiness of your employees and your customers, then you are on the right track.

We at ATI-Mirage can help. Join us for our next workshops:

Ignite! Leadership Program for Middle Managers

Supervisor Toolkit

Managing People and Performance

Simplify your day with these 4 Office 365 apps!

As well as the tools like Excel and Word that you already know and use, Office 365 has a wealth of great apps to help you and your team every day. Simplify your day and processes with these tools and get the work done easily. No matter what device you’re on, you can be productive from anywhere. and you can collaborate with your team in an intuitive and effective way.

Here are 4 applications that will make your professional and personal life easier

1. Microsoft Planner

Teamwork has never been this easy! With this very intuitive application, create a plan, and quickly start assigning tasks to organise your team. Tasks can be broken down into sub-tasks by using checklists. The in-built dashboard shows the progress of your plan in a graphical view.

Tip: Use labels to organise your tasks by amount of effort, “quick tasks”, ‘medium effort”, “high effort”. You can easily pick a task from the “quick task” list if you have a spare 15min!

2. Microsoft To Do

Use this clear interface to set up tasks with a due date, reminder, notes and sharing files with colleagues, family or friends. Accomplish what’s meaningful for you by setting daily goals with My Day. This intelligent feature will give you personalized suggestions to update your to-do list.

Tip: To avoid stress, break tasks down into simple steps, with due dates and reminders to keep you on track! Connect Microsoft To Do with Outlook and Cortana and stay organised at work, home and on the go.

3. Microsoft Forms

MS Forms will be a huge help when you need to create surveys, polls, or quizzes. Create Surveys to collect feedback, measure employee or customer satisfaction and organize team events. Build quizzes to evaluate your inducted employees or student knowledge, determine their progress and focus on topics that need improvement. Forms also allow you to assign points with automatic grading. Use the polls to find out where the team should meet or what team building activity to organise.

Tip: You have just sent out your survey and start getting responses, but how do you analyse them? Simply click on “Responses tab” and get visual representations of all the answers, making it very easy to understand! Best of all, you can export your data to Excel for an in-depth analysis!

4. Microsoft Power Automate

Boost your productivity with Power Automate by automating business processes for the entire company. Power Automate allows for the linking of various applications to facilitate the flow of information. For example, you can set up Power Automate to create a routine for document approval, or add an entry to a SharePoint list when a Tweet with a specific hashtag is posted.

Tip: Use the Power Automate templates to quickly get started, there are templates which link a large number of applications, you will probably find the one you want with a quick search.

Learn more about these amazing features at our Free Breakfast Seminar on 19th March.

We at ATI-Mirage can help. Join us for our next workshops:

Collaborate with Office 365

Microsoft Power Automate

Microsoft PowerApps

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft OneNote Paperless Office

Microsoft Power Business Intelligent (BI)

5 Top tips for newly promoted managers

Typically, it takes up to 6 months for a new employee to feel comfortable in a new job. As a newly promoted manager within your organisation, you may not have the luxury of time to settle in. Operational demands mean you must get on with the job of leading your team from day one.

Even if you know it will take some time to truly understand the needs of your new position, fortunately, there are steps you can take to make sure you get off to a great start.

1. Know why they chose you

Understand why you were the preferred person for the role. You hold key skills and experiences which are highly regarded. Use this knowledge to guide you during your first few weeks in the decision-making process. For example, maybe the company is going through a huge change process. You have extensive experience in managing change from previous roles. Use your experience to help guide and lead your new team.

2. Behave like a leader

Transitioning from team member to a management role can be tricky. You may have some people on your team who you also consider being good friends. Now you’re in a senior role, there may come a time when you must manage them. It’s important to behave like a leader, not a friend. When communicating be clear when you’re in manager-mode and when you’re in friendship-mode. Be open about your approach to the team, this will help them understand your new behaviours.

3. Run a great meeting

The priority is to spend enough time with your team to understand their pain points and where they need your support. Developing a reputation for holding a good meeting will provide huge benefits as it generates active participation. This leads to productive conversations and measurable results.

4. Learn how to say “no”

Before you can say no with confidence, you must be clear about why you have said no. Becoming a manager includes more extra work than you’ve experienced before. Effectively managing your workload without getting burnt out is key when transitioning to a manager role. Your team relies upon you to be present and available to them. Identify what you’re responsible for and acknowledge what’s not your responsibility. If you don’t know what your boundaries are, then you won’t be able to communicate them to others.

5. Learn from every experience

Your new role will throw you some challenges, so be open to those experiences. It’s likely you had a perception of what your new position would be like before you applied. Be prepared for these perceptions to be challenged. Take each experience and learn from it. What worked well, what could be done differently? Overtime these experiences will build your confidence. You will learn and grow into the leader you aim to be.

Know perception isn’t often the reality, it will take time to understand the demands of your new role. Adopting these tips will help you get off to a quick start while you determine what needs to be done to move the team forward.