How to Create Transparent and Accountable Teams With TimeBee
Transparency and accountability are key to running successful work teams. According to the University of Berkeley, team transparency is a phenomenon where information is shared openly, with everyone being honest about their milestones and challenges. Fostering an inclusive team atmosphere is vital for nurturing trust and unity among team members. Emphasizing team transparency means facilitating a system of open communication. This entails sharing relevant information, feedback, and expectations. At the same time, this flow must be two-way, welcoming and valuing various ideas and viewpoints. While teams are part of every business setup, establishing trust and accountability may not be easy. Here’s how you can make your work teams more transparent and accountable: Set Clear Goals It’s always a good policy to start by spelling out the specifics of a team venture. When a team is set up, communicate the purpose and desired outcomes, as well as the expected level of performance by each team member. This can help them perform accordingly and align their expectations with yours rather than walking around on eggshells. Describe Transparency & Accountability For many workers, words like transparency and accountability may carry stress-inducing connotations. When you communicate, you will keep things transparent and explain what you mean in practical terms. This means communicating what transparency practices you’ll implement and what benefits you want. At the same time, make sure you ask team members what transparency measures are the best. A great idea is to sit team members down for a discussion before a project starts. Ask them to share ideas on how they’ll hold each other accountable at various steps of the project. This way, they’ll be more at ease with being held accountable since they’re devising them. Provide Essential Information & Resources Holding teams accountable shouldn’t mean you’re micromanaging their decisions. Rather, you should trust their talent and experience and encourage them to use both to realize organizational goals. Keeping team members guessing about important information is the opposite of transparency. When you create teams, make sure you share all essential information with them. Also, they should be empowered to use any required resources and make decisions regarding them. Knowing they’ll be held answerable for their use, workers are likely to be super-conscious of how they handle company resources and maximize their use of them. Model Transparency You can model transparency by being candid and authentic about your challenges and struggles. Make sure your productivity dashboard and timesheets are visible to your team members, too. Admit your mistakes, and ask for suggestions to improve your personal performance. Welcoming feedback for improvements can be insightful. If you’re a team leader, your attitude can determine that of your team members. Vulnerability and modesty can earn the trust of your coworkers and encourage them to reciprocate. Celebrate Success and Learn from Failures Acknowledge the accomplishments and contributions made by your team members, whether on an individual or collective basis. Show your gratitude and appreciation for their dedication and success. You may use monetary or non-monetary rewards to motivate your team. Additionally, study the team’s failures to extract valuable lessons. Engage in discussions to analyze what went wrong or could have been handled better. Finally, devise strategies with workers’ feedback to handle similar challenges in the future. Use a Time Tracker Your team’s transparency depends on how you’re going to monitor their work. Using an automated time tracker can offer numerous advantages. It effortlessly records the time of each worker without manual input. On top of it, the real-time data from tracking time offers valuable insights. As a best practice, we advise using an organizational dashboard that shows who is working on what and for how long at any given time. With such information, you uphold both accountability and transparency within the project. By tracking your time, you’ll be able to: There are countless time-tracking tools available today. Let’s discuss some of the standout features of TimeBee for better understanding. Designed for Remote & On-site Teams A smart time-tracking app must be designed with all kinds of team arrangements in mind. Team members must be able to track their time at home or in the office. Additionally, they can easily collaborate on projects and tasks by viewing project progress. Accurate Time Tracking Automated timesheets should be initiated and stopped by users themselves. Having access to their daily and weekly productivity, team members may feel obliged to perform better against their previous stats. Activity Reports Viewing how individual workers spend their time gives you a transparent view of your team’s productivity. Sophisticated time trackers go one step further and classify time between productive and unproductive activities Looking to Enhance Accountability and Transparency? Try 0ut TimeBee By knowing which workers need a gentle nudge in the right direction (maybe they need a break), you can help your team members snap out of productivity. Web & App Monitoring If you’re a team lead, nothing would give you better access to your team members’ work day than their web & app usage reports. TimeBee categorizes workers’ time at work in terms of hours spent between apps and web pages. You can tell straight away how dedicated they are to work or if they’re trying to commit time theft. Email Updates & Reports As a team admin, you can receive regular reports on project progress and individual team member’s productivity through email updates. So, even if you’re off-site, you can monitor productivity and give timely feedback to team members. Spontaneous Employee Screenshots Workers being aware that their timesheets may be tallied with periodic screenshots can be a powerful way of ensuring they’re not messing around at work. In addition, screenshots of employees’ devices provide proof of work and project progress, which can be presented to clients and during discussions of performance appraisal. Offline Tracking Advanced tracking apps offer an offline tracking facility. So even if a team member loses internet connection, they can still record their progress through the tracker. If you have a hybrid team, you can keep track of a
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