Business Culture: How to Improve Accountability
Smaller, more agile staffs often mean larger workloads for employees, and when business picks up and things get busy, it’s harder for workers to get it all done without some details slipping through the cracks. Author and Inc. Magazine columnist Kevin Daum provides the following advice to help create accountability and growing companies.
Daum points out the most of the time when things fall through the cracks, it’s not intentional. “People are often overloaded with responsibilities that go beyond their capacity,” he writes. When things get missed the trouble starts.
Daum says when people are overloaded, they prioritize their actions to manage the workload. Three criteria must be present for a task get to the top of the prioritization list. Any task missing one of these three is doomed to be low priority, Daum writes.
1. Motivation
People need to know why the task needs to be completed. “If the motivation is unclear or nonexistent, then people will find a way to procrastinate a task until the bitter end.”
Business owners need to articulate a clear and compelling reason for why the task should be done.
2. Consequence
If there’s no clear result from the task getting done, employees will rank the task lower on the priority list. To fix this, business owners should make sure that every assigned task has a clear, stated result for both completion and leaving it undone, writes Daum.
3. Structure
Daum writes that one of the biggest problems is that the person assigned the task doesn’t know how to do it. “He or she may not have the knowledge or resources and no one wants to appear stupid or inept.” Daum recommends developing an easy one-page plan for dealing with each important task. More information about what that one-page plan should include is available at the original article here.
