Video: How To Motivate An Overworked Team?
Your team is already overworked—and just when launch time approaches, a client comes to you with (another!) request. You’ve already brought a few of these additional requests to your team, and the last thing you need is to ask them to do even more.
What do you do? You’ve already cashed in all of your favors—you’ve got no “currency” because you’ve already got your team driving at 100%. How do you approach an already overworked team, asking them to churn out just a little more work?
In this video, Kelly and I discuss how we approach this issue. We talk about how we deal with requests for extra work when our teams are already maxed out. Find answers to questions like:
- Who should I approach with the request first, and why?
- Is it okay to bribe my team? What can I bribe them with?
- When should I issue a change request for additional out of scope work?
Watch the video, and find some additional resources in the links below to help you motivate your overworked team.
This videocast is brought to you by Clarizen, the leader in enterprise projects and project management software.
Resources To Help You Manage Changes & Motivate Your Teams
As we touched on in the video, in a perfect world, and with a perfect project plan and seamless client communication, we’d never have to ask our teams to do work that’s out of scope.
But it’s not a perfect world. We deal with scope creep on almost every project, and we have to find ways to build happy, high-performing teams in spite of shrinking budgets, ad hoc requests, a quickly changing workplace.
That’s our challenge as project managers. Make sure you’re prepared for this challenge by knowing all of the project controls you’ve got at your disposal to effectively handle requests from clients. And make sure you can identify and deal with scope creep when it starts to appear in your projects.
What’s Your Take?
What do you do when asking your team to take on work that’s outside of what they agreed upon? How do you motivate your teams and make sure that they’re not overworked—but still deliver the project on time?
Share your advice with our community in the comments below, or join the conversation with hundreds of other digital leaders in our DPM Slack space.
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