A lot of leading and liaising in your job? Your toolkit needs Industry Box
Because teamwork is more than communication. You workday cannot be driven round by incoming communications distracting you, or important information transmitted with interruption or corruption.
You need quiet self-work time to think things through, to design strategies, and to feed into teamwork. And you need well organised information at hand to start self-work.
For these reasons, you need low-noise, high-organisation teamwork tools in your toolkit. And among the different tools in this category, Industry Box is the only one designed specifically for general day-to-day use. From kick-starting an extensive team of work-from-home stakeholders to participating in multiple projects.
We will explain below.
When you lead and liaise, teamwork proliferates. Self-work suffers and erodes your weekends and performance
You could be a start-up founder, a private equity fund manager, a law firm partner or the director of a digital agency. Or a corporate executive. You are leading highly skilled, highly motivated colleagues on big ticket projects or initiatives. And you are constantly working alongside clients or external partners. It is teamwork in the broadest sense.
You are placed right in the middle, like a mediator, or a busy junction. When your colleagues have some outputs, they will inform you to pass on. When they need guidance or clients' data, they will call on you to resolve. When your clients/external partners have a steering request or want to know the latest developments, they will ping you. Whichever direction of teamwork, you are involved.
And you should be. Your ability to lead and liaise teamwork is a function of your involvement. But that means a lot of incoming communications constantly grabbing your attention, which you have to summarise, synergise and send forth.
That's paradoxical. The more teamwork you lead and liaise, the more incoming communication is there to demand your attention, the more deep and focused self-work time you need to work on the communications, yet the less self-work time you now have. You either spend your weekend or night times doing "real work", or give knee-jerk responses to some of the communications to literally "kick them down the road".
When self-work is in deficit, your work life balance and performance are at stake.
Industry Box removes communication noise from teamwork to give you quality self-work time
Not all teamwork need to come through attention-grabbing communication tools. When they come without the noise, you preserve large chunks of quiet time for self-work. And when teamwork information lands on your desk already organised, the whole chunk of time is about self-working, not sorting out the information.
That is what Industry Box is designed to give you, and your broad team. It is a low-noise team productivity tool, where team leads publish posts on projects' latest development, key information and scope. Instead of creating a stir when distributed through emails, meetings or instant chats, the posts will appear on Industry Box portal quietly and also collated into a daily digest email. Your broad team members can read the email once a day, glance over all the headlines and plan out their workday.
The posts are also categorised by tracks, and only team members relevant to a track are added as subscribers. This way, a team member will only receive relevant posts from tracks she is subscribed to, further taking away noise.
Unlike communication tools especially instant chat tools like Slack or MS Teams, these posts are not interrupted by responses. The original posts will be presented in their intended forms, key messages not corrupted by personal opinions or patch-ups attracted by the original posts.
When you and your broad team are set up on Industry Box, communication tools can do what they do best - supporting real time, attention-grabbing teamwork like workshops and fast-moving discussions. For key information, latest updates and scope, move them to Industry Box and give everyone more self-work time to get things done.
Industry Box is light-weight and designed for everyday use across clients
Industry Box is not the sole tool in this low-noise, high-organisation teamwork space. There are contenders - work management platforms, and scenario-specific tools.
Work management platforms are too heavy-weight and administrative-focused
The likes of Wrike, Monday.com and Asana are all the rage in this age of remote teamwork. They are very good at the administrative side of projects - organising task lists, and tracking their progress at team member level. For this purpose, they are granular and stuffed with many add-on features.
But they are not so good when you are working with multiple external partners/clients. Your partners and clients need to learn to use these heavy-weight tools, to grapple with all these features. This takes a lot of efforts. And these tools focus on presenting which tasks are at which stage with all the design drafts, internal working conversations etc. Your clients are unlikely to be interested in these nitty-gritty details, and your team is less-than-thrilled if an early-stage draft is exposed.
Instead, clients/partners want to spend time on knowing the emerging insights or results, and feed into their strategies or workplans, or steer the focus for the next stage of collaboration. They want information coming out of the project, not information about the project. That's what the Industry Box posts are about, especially when categorised by tracks. Your working information can stay within your internal tracks, and have dedicated external-facing tracks to keep the partners/clients connected with the project and contribute as needs arise.
Industry Box is also intuitive to use - when your external partner opens an account and logs in to the portal, they will see the posts from their subscribed tracks. Even if they do not log in, they will still receive the daily digest email. Industry Box keeps them connected for teamwork, without a miss.
Scenario-specific tools complement with Industry Box to create a low-noise, high-organisation environment for self-work
There are quite a few of these scenario-specific tools, such as Doodle for scheduling meetings across multiple team members without creating chains of emails to spin through the options. Or Agreedo to collaborate on meeting agendas, background materials and post-meeting action points. Or Prezi for tracking whether team members have read the critical information.
They are all great for their specific scenarios, and should be adopted if you tread on those scenarios frequently. But they focus on taking specific noise and organisation burdens off your shoulder, not a broad tool that removes noise off your general day-to-day teamwork. That's Industry Box's area.
When you combine Industry Box with your selection of scenario-specific tools, you are removing noise and establishing organisation broadly and deeply. A self-work-friendly environment ensues.
What is low-noise, high-organisation work environment like? Well, like your weekend
If you don't believe in the virtues of low-noise, high-organisation work environment for self-work, just reflect on your most recent weekend or weekday night work sessions. You are working on your own, quietly reading through emails and reports, jotting down key information and making sense of them. You are trying out different angles-of-attack for next week's board meeting presentation and pondering which one sticks. All the work in your head, at a pace you feel comfortable with, for a duration you can control.
That's what it is like, just that you now get it during your work hours. Leave your weekends and weekday nights to your family, friends, or your leisurely self.
Give Industry Box a try. Or see how its key features such as daily digest, user analytics, tracks and subscriptions and post creation, distribution and presentation workflow bring you the low-noise, high-organisation work environment that will raise productivity and performance. For you, and your broad teams of colleagues and external partners/clients.
About Industry Box:
Industry Box is dedicated to introducing streamlined & frictionless stakeholder management, as we believe this to be a hidden productivity blackhole for most companies and managers.
Apart from raising awareness about this issue and promoting industry best practice, we have also designed a digital tool with all the best practices built in, so that managers & leaders can introduce and benefit from best-in-class stakeholder management without the learning curve.
See here for our other blog articles on raising productivity through better stakeholder management, or by becoming a more productivity-conscious stakeholder.