Get Your Team To Document Their Work
5 Actions You Can Take to Help Your Employees Develop and Grow
Each and every day, your employees are completing tasks, finishing projects and launching programs that are helping your team achieve its goals and objectives. But the world of work moves very fast, and we are often so busy that it’s easy to lose track of all the great work that’s being produced by your team.
A simple way to fix this is make small adjustments so that your employees start keeping track of and documenting their work.
Getting your employees to keep track and document their work has many benefits. First, it makes people more aware of what they are doing and contributing. This is important so they can see the progress they are making but also to make sure that they are actually working on the right things that lead to your goals and objectives.
Second, it helps with professional advocacy, or the promotion and sharing of your work inside of your company. As a manager or leader of a team, part of your job is to promote and share the work that your team does, to help your team get credit for what they are doing and to support and help others who would benefit. Having the work documented makes it easy for this to happen.
Third, it also helps employees with their career development and growth. A common challenge that many people face with career development is that they focus a lot on where they want to go in the future.
That is important, but in order to consider what’s ahead, it’s important to see what is literally right in front of you, and for most of us, that's the work that we do each day.
Making space for your employees to literally write out and document what they are working on and getting them to see the progress and growth they are making with their contributions can often serve as a great starting point for employees as they think about their career development.
What this also does is it helps employees see that career development isn’t a monolithic thing that happens once a year in the corner or on the side, but rather, right in the day to day work that they are doing.
5 Ways to Help Your Employees Document Their Work To Fuel Their Career Development
So if you want to encourage your employees to document their work, where can you start? The following are a number of tactical suggestions that you can consider for your team and employees:
1:1 Doc - Having a 1:1 doc with your employees is a great way to have a digital paper trail of the work they are working on and how you can support them. There are lots of versions of what a 1:1 doc can look like (I am personally agnostic, whatever works best is great) but having a space where they can fill you in on what they are doing on a weekly basis that you can read in advance of your 1:1 meeting, as well as go over during the meeting is a great way to stay aware of what they are doing.
Weekly Email - The weekly email is a brief summary update via email that your employees can share with you that outlines what they are working on, any key milestones, and any key asks for help. This is helpful especially if you don’t have 1:1’s each week. This can also be useful in the sense that you can share some of these with your own leaders to help amplify the work of your people.
Walking Deck - A Walking deck is a brief overview of a key project, initiative or program that you are working on. It can be especially helpful if you are needing to share information on this project with a number of key stakeholders or employees. This 4-5 slide deck is meant to convey the nature of the project, the timeline, the key outcomes, and any other important information. Being able to make this accessible helps show other people what you are doing when you need to asynchronously get their support. But what it also does is it helps your employees clearly articulate their strategy and plans for what they are doing and working on.
Slack Channel - Create a slack channel specifically for your #wins and #learnings and give your employees a chance to share with one another. Reward and call out great behaviors, and get your team into the habit of sharing their work.
What Do You Do Here? - This is an exercise that I developed back when I was leading a team to help my employees see the progress they were making in their work. Sometimes, taking a pause and reflecting on your work can be a good investment of time, and an unlock for future opportunities. This exercise is meant to do just that, and is one that I now run in alot of my training programs for managers and leaders.
On a regular basis, I would have my team open up a Google doc or write down on a sheet of paper the following information
The key projects they worked on that month/quarter/year
For each project, the specific skills they thought they were using to complete that project
On a scale of 1-5, (1 being Not at all, 5 Being Heck Yes) if they were good at the project
On a scale of 1-5 (1 being Not at all, 5 Being Heck Yes) if they liked doing that project
Yes or No if they wanted to do more of that project
This exercise was helpful to me as a manager but also to many of the employees I worked with. It not only made sure we figured out what they were working on, but more specifically, the elements of the work that they liked doing and wanted to do more of, and what they hoped to do less of. That information was so useful to our discussions around career development, but only because we took the time to document and synthesize it.
This information helped me as a manager identify where and how I could structure and put employees in roles and on projects that helped us achieve our goals but also worked toward their individual strengths and aspirations, while helping them feel like they were making progress towards their own personal aspirations.
Helping Your Employees See The Drum Beats
I like to tell people that career development and growth is more about the drum beats than the lightning bolts. A Lightning bolt is something that happens very infrequently but when it does it occurs in a big showy way, and you never know when it’s going to happen again. Drum beats on the other hand, are small and you can often barely hear them. But once you hear one, then another one comes. And after time, a bunch of drum beats make a really nice tune. I think that is often how a lot of career development works. It’s not about the big moments, but rather, those everyday drumbeats that over time, lead to career development.
Getting your employees to start keeping track of their work can help them when they want to start thinking about their career development and growth. But more than that, it can help you as a manager identify how you can use the talents and strengths of your team members, and put them in roles where they can be successful. That doesn’t just help you, it helps them too.
Up Next in May: A handful of leadership programs on leading distributed teams, AAPI Month, and the ATD Conference in New Orleans.
If you’re looking for some help for your learning and development, leadership development or professional development for this year, I’d love to work with you: Here is how I might be able to assist:
Team Trainings & Professional Development: Happy to facilitate training or professional development opportunity for your team & organization - common topics include: influence without authority, navigating change, hybrid working, and others.
Consulting & Advisory Work - Are you looking to improve the ways of working of your team or organization or looking for guidance on remote/hybrid work? Let’s chat about how we can work together
Leadership & Learning Programs: Formal training and leadership development in your company, such as new manager or new leader training, or skill-based programs.
Feel free to contact me directly for more details!
Have a great week!
Al