Most people do a bit of spring cleaning at home as the days start to get longer and brighter again – freshening up the house, tidying the garden, clearing out the shed – and it’s a great way to start the year at work too.
Hopefully by March you’ll have an idea of your budget for the following 12 months, so it makes sense to take a ‘broom’ through the office, refreshing your systems and getting organised for the jobs to come.
Busy communications teams are often given multiple tasks that lead to conflicting demands on time, and delivery can be a constant challenge. Spending some time looking at the resources you have and how they can best be organised, plus considering the areas where you could bring in outside help, can be a real benefit when it comes to handling those ‘crunch times’.
As with housework, spring cleaning the office should be a team effort, as everyone will have their own ideas to offer and opinions on the challenges you all face. Areas you could cover together include:
- Look at your team and allocate leads for upcoming projects – remembering to take holidays into account.
- Look at the year ahead and check for any diary clashes or periods of heavy workload where you may need to add capacity on a short to medium term basis. You could also consider whether ongoing external support for some of your day-to-day tasks could help your team focus on special projects or events. For example, you could use an outside expert to produce your regular newsletters – something we did for Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust every month for about three years.
- Look at the options for taking on extra part-time staff or contracting a specialist agency to cover those busy times, and take the time now to identify suitable providers that you can then call on at short notice when needed. At Sorted Communications, our flexible team structure means we can respond quickly when you need extra capacity right now. Using external support rather than recruiting may be more cost effective than you think; it won’t involve a recurrent cost and the amount of work you outsource – and therefore the associated cost – can be easily increased or reduced as your needs change.
- Review the systems you use within the team. Is there room for improvement in how and when you communicate with each other? Does everyone always know what other people are working on? If not, a quick weekly team meeting or simple whiteboard system could be useful – the few minutes it takes to keep each other up to date on projects quickly pays dividends when answering each other’s phone calls and in ensuring that someone doesn’t start working on something that another team member already has on their desk.
- Tidy up. If you can, block out an hour or two to look at the office with fresh eyes. Get rid of those boxes of unwanted leaflets from under your desk, tidy up the stationery cupboard so you can find what you need quickly, sort through your in-tray and recycle all those old notes cluttering your desk that are no longer needed. You could even make time for a digital declutter as well – spend half an hour deleting old emails and duplicate files, organise and rename computer folders and generally get on top of your IT so that it works for you, not against you.
By planning ahead and getting organised you can smooth over the peaks at work – and possibly enjoy a few troughs when it’s quiet enough to stop and congratulate the team on a job well done.
If you’re considering using outside support but you’re not sure how to make it work, get in touch today for a no-obligation chat to see how we could help make your workload manageable all year round.