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Work life balance – Project Managers & their teams

Work Life Balance – How To Run Your Project Peacefully Without Burning Out Your Team

Whether it is a small internal project or large complex multi stakeholder project, Project Manager is expected to deliver the project within time, on budget and meet the project objective and stakeholder expectation. Most Project Manager only focus on this point and tried to catch up with schedule without respecting project team time and limitation which ends up exhausting and burning out their team, makes the project cost their work life balance.

Though manage a project is indisputable a responsibility of Project Manager, project can be carried out smoothly with all team member cooperation. Fail in one project management process will impact the whole project.

One of the key points is be wise with your time. Try to be smart project manager and not merely a hardworking one. These points can be taken into consideration to achieve a good ambience within your project team.

Manage team member communication flow

As Project Manager, you must understand that a good project starts with a good communication within team. Everything must be clear and not left to imagination. Project team must be well informed of the project objectives as well as how they can achieve it in project workplan. They must be kept reminded of the tasks that is assigned to them. They must know that they can come in concord to their superior or decision makers to convey their issue, have it escalated and resolve it in timely manner. They must know how to access resources that they need. They must also facilitate by communication channel where they can create comfortable discussion on events, ideas, tasks, risks, issues and deliverables that they are working on together. Those aspect made possible with the use of digital tools. eCEOs ePMO as PMIS made above things possible for Project Manager to run project peacefully from your comfort place

Conduct meeting as effectively as possible.

While many Westerner see less importance of meeting, Asian still find meeting important as it gives visibility to confirm everything in the project is handled properly. We can still achieve the best from both world by conduct a meeting in short duration periodic manner. Having a meeting more than 1 hour will risk you lose your audience focus or interest. 30 – 50 minutes will be enough with 5 minutes conveying previous meeting recap, 20 – 40 minutes having discussion on agreed items or agenda, and last 5 minutes to summarize and repeat list of actions that needs to be taken. To enhance the effectiveness, team member can have needed report prior the meeting. eCEOs ePMO for example can be configured to send out reports to project team a night before or in the morning. Thus, the participants have ample time to read the report and come well prepared for the meeting.

If you have team member scattered in different locations, the best practice is to use virtual meeting. One can send out invites with link that enables all participant to join the meeting without must be physically attend. This means respecting your team member time, and your time, and their limitation. It also means decrease lost time spent for travelling and use it for more productive way such as finishing the assigned task.

Keep in mind that it is always better to have productive and motivated team members who are adequately rested instead of having overworked team members who are tired, demotivated, or have run out of energy with the project still having a mile to go. That way work life balance is not just a myth but something that can be achieved.