Bosses who make the planning are dinosaurs of the industrial age. They made sense when bosses knew everything and labourers didn’t. With the Internet, all that has changed. It’s okay to admit it’s the 21st century (not the 19th) and to get everybody involved. Stop deciding, discuss!
There are plenty of tools to involve your co-workers in planning. A popular one is the Agile method that started in software development.
In Agile, you pin all the tasks on the left side of a board. Every day, you pick a new task and move it to the middle of the board. When you’re done, that task moves to the right side.
One disadvantage of Agile is that there is still a Master who prepares the tasks for the board. Instead, make this into a task like any other. Anybody who feels like it can then prepare the tasks.
Agile is a great method for homogenous teams where everybody has similar skills. Sometimes, this isn’t the case. It soon becomes clear who is the best match for a task. At Eonic, I wrote the documentation. Others were better at helping sales or answering technical questions. When a new task came up, it was pretty easy to decide who would do it. But even then, we always allowed anybody to take up any task: no better way to learn than by doing it. If the task was critical, an expert would assist or review it.
While the system we used at Eonic was simple and informal, it had all the seeds of postmodern team management. Instead of function profiles, we used competences. Instead of centralised planning, we discussed. Instead of being lived, the team members lived their own jobs.
This post is part of the 8 Tips To Get Your Co-Workers Engaged. Click the link to see the other tips.