Category: Productivity

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Productivity

Dealing with Email After Holiday

email after holiday

It’s March Break for many kids across Canada. This means that parents have the lucky task of thinking up meaningful things for their kids to do this week. For some, it’s traveling out of town. According to Toronto’s Pearson Airport, Friday, March 8th was the busiest March break travel day with almost 200k people traveling out of the city.

Vacations for me have always been a mildly stressful event. The organization and drive needed at work both before and after the vacation are sometimes more trouble than the vacation is relaxing. Yet, vacations and unplugging are a vital part of keeping your creativity and productivity up. We need to disconnect to continue to perform and function at our best.

So, in the absence of never taking a vacation, the pre-vacation and post-vacation trauma is something we just have to deal with. In January’s post on productivity, I talked about the 3 foolproof ways to streamline your work. Today I want to delve a bit deeper into managing emails, specifically before and after vacations. Dealing with email after holiday doesn’t have to be stressful or traumatic.

For most of us, emails are the bane of our existence. We love it because it allows swift communication, and we hate it for the fact that it effectively attaches us to our phones 24/7. And when we go on vacation, the fact that we can’t quickly respond means that we come back to maybe 1000 emails on the Monday after vacation.

Most of us have simply accepted that fact, however, there are ways to reduce the email overwhelm with some steps you can take before you go on vacation.

Set up a Good Out-of-office Email

This is a no-brainer strategy to dealing with email after holiday, and I’m sure most of you do this already. However, most out-of-office emails are not written to deter the sender from sending the email. They say something like “I will be out of the office until March 18 with limited access to email. If your matter is urgent, please contact Samantha Sweets at ssweets@abccompany.com.”

There are two things wrong with this auto-reply email. First, it says that you have limited access to email. Now, that may be true, however, when people write that, what the receiver reads is that you will be checking your emails periodically. Which means that you will likely reply to this email while you’re on vacation.

Second, it tells them that you will be back from vacation on March 18, which is the Monday after your week-long holiday. When you write this, people will expect a response from you on March 18, the first day back from your vacation. Now, you and I both know that this is an unrealistic expectation.

Here’s an alternate message for your out-of-office:

“I am currently out of the office with no access to emails. I will reply to your email upon my return to the office on Tue, Mar 19. If your matter requires an urgent answer, please contact my colleague Samantha Sweets at ssweets@abccompany.com.”

In the second version, you’re telling them that you will reply upon your return on Tuesday which is the day after you’re back in the office. Now, if you happen to reply on a Monday, they will be delighted, and if not, you’re meeting their expectations.

Also, you’re emphasizing that they should contact your colleague if they require an urgent answer. Most things do not require an urgent answer, but if they do, Samantha Sweet is available.

Don’t Tackle Emails as Soon as You Return

Our first instinct upon landing and unpacking our stuff on the Sunday night before returning to work is to look at our emails in case we missed something earth-shattering. I would urge you to resist the temptation of doing so. It only causes anxiety when you see a thread of emails without any context.

And, let’s be honest, we’ve all been there where we answer to an email only to read a bit more and find out that things were resolved and your email today will cause more confusion than help.

Here’s what I suggest instead to dealing with email after holiday. First, sort all your unread emails by subject line. This is helpful because you can quickly glance over and see where each email conversation was left off. Most likely you’ll see that many, if not all, of the emails, were already resolved. And if they weren’t, you’ll be able to see where things are at.

Second, schedule a meeting with Samantha, your out of office contact, as soon as possible on your first day back. Bring your laptop with you and ask her for a rundown of all that happened while you were away. I can’t stress this enough. In fact, I would suggest that you pre-book this meeting in both your calendars before you go on vacation so it’s in both your calendars.

It’s only after these 2 steps that I recommend you sit down to answer your emails.

Respond to the Last Email of the Conversation Thread

Once you’ve sorted the emails by subject line and have got the rundown from Samantha, you can start your responses to the emails.

My suggestion is to respond to the last email of each conversation thread. A simple response like, “Adam, I see that your question was answered. I’m back from vacation now and we have our next 1:1 schedule on Thursday. Looking forward to catching up then.”

Your time is your most valuable asset as an HR Business Partner (or any professional) and you need to guard it with everything you’ve got. Most people would say “give me a call if you want to chat” (I know I did that for years). But it’s not necessary.

If you’ve been listening to my advice over the past several weeks, you already have regular 1:1 meeting scheduled with your clients ahead of time. There is very little need then to deviate from that schedule with an unscheduled chat that you could easily cover at your next 1:1.

File Emails as Soon as You Respond

If you’ve read my earlier posts, you know I’m a stickler for a clean inbox. There’s nothing more overwhelming than seeing thousands of emails in your inbox that have already been actioned.

As soon as you reply to that last email in the conversation thread, highlight all the emails in that conversation (you can do this quickly by clicking on the first email, then holding down your “Shift” key, click on the last email in the thread. This will highlight all the emails).

Then simply drag them to the appropriate folder that you’ve already set up. That way, you don’t have to think about or see those emails again and you can focus your energy on the things that matter.

Sit Back and Enjoy the Rewards of Being Organized

Repeat the process for all your conversation threads. There may be some emails that have not received a response. In this case, you will need to get back to the sender, but again, as soon as you’ve replied to the email, file it away.

Then, revel in the empty inbox and go grab your much-deserved beverage of choice. Dealing with email after holiday – piece of cake!

Vacations don’t need to be overwhelming. If you set up a process for dealing with email after holiday before you leave and have a solid process to deal with them when you return, your time away from the office will be a non-issue.

You can set up a similar process for the projects that you’re responsible for too. I don’t have space in this post to talk about that, but you get the idea. Prepare for milestones and deliverables during the week that you’re away. My recommendation would be to put someone else in charge such as Samantha Sweets.

If you’re an individual contributor or don’t have an acceptable backup person, then build your vacations into the project plan and give your team a heads up that there will be no movement on the project during the time you’re away. I know this sounds drastic, but you’ll be surprised at how little a week matters in the grand scheme of things.

Are you a leader hiring to build your high performing team? Did you know, the number one reason new hires don’t work out is because of their inability to fit within your company culture? I have a handy recruitment guide “Top 10 Interview Questions to Assess Culture Fit” to ensure you hire the right person every single time.

Categories
Productivity Recruitment

The Single Most Effective Way to Stay on Top of Recruitment

Most effective way to manage recruitment

I have a fond relationship with Recruitment. It was one of my first responsibilities as an HR Coordinator and I’ve continued to recruit over the past 12 years at various levels of the organization. Back in the early days, I was fortunate enough to join an HR department with set processes, so I had lots of guidance, templates, and tools to help me. I remember I filled my first role in less than 3 weeks, and I thought I was the best recruiter in the world. However, I quickly found out it was nothing more than beginner’s luck and that some roles were harder to fill than others for a variety of reasons: difficulty in finding candidates, hiring managers getting caught up with other tasks, and me getting side-tracked with other tasks.

For HR Business Partners who are fortunate enough to have a dedicated Talent Acquisition department, the task seems easy enough. Help hiring managers define which roles need to be filled and then introduce them to the Talent team who take it from there.

However, for the rest of us HR Generalists who need to juggle recruitment along with a multitude of other tasks, it’s too easy to let recruitment fall to the wayside. I found that hiring managers would need to follow-up with me to get the status on the hiring process at an embarrassing rate. Yet, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep up. Now, mind you, I was also juggling 10 – 12 open roles along with a very busy HRBP schedule, so it was no wonder. But hiring managers don’t care about what else you have going on. For them, rightfully so, their role is the most important.

So, in my quest to find a more efficient system for myself, I realized that the best way to manage each vacancy was to treat it like a project.

Let me explain.

Project Management as a discipline sets proper expectations around what can be delivered, by when, and for how much. Effective Project Managers can negotiate logical and reasonable deadlines and milestones across stakeholders, teams, and management. They also highlight the potential risks, which areas will likely run into difficulty, and which ones need more attention upfront.

This is exactly what is expected of the Recruitment function within HR.

So, I’d like to share how I keep on top of my open roles and how I treat each and every vacancy as a project to ensure it gets filled in a timely manner and within budget. With today’s sophisticated Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), it’s a lot easier. But even without a fancy ATS, HRBPs can stay on top of all their vacancies with a little work upfront.

There are a few things you need to do up front to set you up for success

Map your recruitment process

Sure, we all know that the basic process: meet with hiring manager, get job specs, create job posting, post job, screen applicants, conduct phone interviews, then in-person interviews, background checks and then an offer letter. That said, each organization is different and it’s important to map out each step of the process and who is involved. I won’t go into the specifics of what a good recruitment process looks like (more on that in a future blog post) but go ahead and map out your organization’s recruitment process and approval steps.

Create a Project Plan template based on your process

The next thing is to create a project plan template. This is simply a list of steps you that the relevant stakeholders need to take in order to close the open role. The trick to this is to include each and every step that needs to happen along with who is responsible for taking those steps. Ultimately, though, you (the Recruiter) are the Project Manager and are responsible for ensuring the project stays on track.

There are a number of tools you can use to create your template. You can do in a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet or use a project management tool such as Asana (my personal favourite because it’s free and it’s online with a free app for your phone).

In a Word document, put in the Title of the vacancy as the heading, next the hiring manager, next milestone dates (E.g. job posting date, resume/phone screening dates, in-person interview dates, second level interviews dates, and offer letter date)

Underneath that, create a table with columns across the top. The 1st column is the task, 2nd column is Responsibility, 3rd column is the Date when it should be completed, and 4th column is the status. You can populate the Responsibility column referring to the process you mapped in the earlier step and the Dates would come from your milestones.

Commit to weekly status updates

The crux of managing a project is providing timely updates on the status. One of my first managers told me I should be providing a recruitment update to my clients every 2 days; however, I’ve found that a weekly update is sufficient. I like to put in the date of the status update at the top of the document (and in the file name) and simply commit to completing the Project Plan for each vacancy on a weekly basis. Pick a day of the week when you’ll update the Project Plan and send it out to your respective hiring managers and put that date into your calendar or task list. Fridays work best for me.

I like to send the Project Plan to the hiring manager at the beginning of the recruitment cycle so we’re all on the same page. It also has the added benefit of keeping me honest as I’ve publicly committed to the dates.

When things go sideways

Inevitably, there will come a time when things won’t go according to plan. There have been only a handful of times in my 12 years of recruiting when the recruitment process has been smooth and I’ve hit every milestone. Your top candidate will drop out of the running, hiring managers will change their mind, the job won’t attract the right candidates the first go around and we need to redefine the criteria. These things do and will continue to happen. The point of the Project Plan isn’t to eliminate these things; it’s to ensure that when they do happen all parties are aware of the issues and are able to quickly come together to course correct.

Project Management is one of those disciplines that we don’t often see in the HR space, mainly because much of what we do is undisciplined. However, as I do this more and more, I’ve found that we create the anxiety around us and with a little focus and discipline we can break out of the I’m-so-busy-it-hurts routine that we’ve come to see as a badge of honour. There’s no honour in chaos and busy-ness.

Recruitment is exactly the type of work that could be done more effectively (and more efficiently) using the basic principles of Project Management. I would say that even with an ATS, a Project Plan provides an excellent overview of each of your vacancies and ensures all stakeholders are on the same page. So, the next time your boss or your hiring manager’s boss asks you for a status update on a vacancy in your company, send them the most recent Project Plan for the role. An added benefit of Project Plans for each role is that anyone can pick up the recruitment of a role when someone leaves the organization or goes on vacation.

If you would like a copy of my own project management template, I’d be happy send it to you. Just email me at sadaf@carasconsulting.com.

**I’d like to invite you to my community. Head on over to www.carasconsulting.com and sign up for my weekly updates, insights from the business, events and other nuggets that I only share on email. I’ll see you there!**

Categories
Productivity

3 Foolproof Ways to Streamline Your Work

3 Foolproof ways to streamline your work

This post is written for HR professionals, specifically HR Business Partners, but I think anyone in a client-facing role can use the advice to streamline your work.

You wake up right before your alarm goes off in the morning. You’re well-rested and peaceful. You stretch and make a mental list of all that you’re going to get done today at work. You list the 3-4 big things you need to take care of today and smile. It should be easy enough. You stretch one more time and your hand brushes against your phone on the nightstand. Instinctively, you reach for it and check your email.

You realize too late that you probably shouldn’t have done that!

There’s an onslaught of emails from between 10 pm when you hit the bed and well past midnight. Your boss needs an executive offer letter done up before 10 am, there’s an employee issue you have to deal with one of your clients on the west coast, and the new SVP wants her team’s compensation, along with all sorts of other employee data.

You scroll through the emails, spend too long reading through them, which sets you behind schedule by too long and by the time you get to work, you’re in a mad panic. You’ve completely lost track of the 3 big things you wanted to get done today. The next day, you have few more “catch up” emails to get through, and before you know it, you’re completely overwhelmed and drowning, rushing to get things done and compromising on quality.

Now imagine another day where you would never freak out about the same email from your boss because you’ve already done up a draft for this new executive with only a few things that need to be plugged in. And that behavior issue would never arise because the manager would already know how to deal with it. You’ve coached him so well after all. And the new SVP won’t ask for compensation information on her team, because you already gave that info to her when you helped with her onboarding.

I’ll bet you’re thinking that scenario 2 sounds lovely, but in the real world, that’s not how things go down. Or perhaps you thrive in Scenario 1 because you love the feeling of the unknown, and who likes planning their day anyway? It can get so boring.

Let me tell you that I was the HRBP in Scenario 1 for years. And for years I convinced myself that the chaos and unpredictability were what I craved. Besides, I told myself, it was part of the job. HRBPs could never have a predictable day. And if they did, I sure as hell didn’t want a piece of that. I thrived in busy environments. And I produced better work when I was swamped and going out of my mind.

The truth is that while I like being busy and I perhaps do indeed complete more work under pressure (note I didn’t say better work), I don’t like feeling stressed. I genuinely feel like I lose months off my life when things get that crazy. And I realized that when I’m busy it’s an ego boost, a feeling that I’m important, that I’m doing something worthy. When in reality it makes me look disorganized, harried, and like I don’t have my shit together. NOT a great impression!

So, I devised a way to ensure I was as organized as possible. So that emails like the ones above didn’t completely derail my day, and that I didn’t fall behind by the daily fires that are almost inevitable in the world of human resources. Here are three things that I did that completely took my career to the next level.

Set up processes

This was a game changer for me. It takes a little time to get organized at first, but the pay off never ends. A process is a systematic series of actions you take in a given situation. I created checklists for pretty much everything: recruitment, onboarding, terminations, performance improvement, board reports, metrics, and any other ongoing tasks I had to manage. I created templates for as many things as I could: employee letters (along with notes in the margins for things I needed to change around), questions to ask new clients, questions for managers when they had an employee issue, commonly asked employee and manager questions, lists of who to call for questions with internal HR issues (payroll, benefits, etc). I had agenda templates for my meetings with clients, with my manager and my team. I created a system to quickly denote tasks for myself in a page full of notes from a meeting. Mine is an asterix with a circle around it. Even now, when I come out of a meeting, I quickly scan my notes for an Asterix with a circle around it and put those tasks into my task manager (more on that in a moment).

The more you can systematize your work, the easier it will be to get things done faster, consistently, and with fewer errors. It also makes training new employees a cinch. The better your processes, the less time and energy you spend on routine work, and the more time you have to spend on partnering with your clients and doing value-add work.

Organize email

I found a way to organize my email that works like a charm no matter which company I’m working for, and no matter which job. I use the same system in my business too. The system is simple and as long as I follow it, nothing ever slips through the cracks.

I create folders in my email for everything. I typically organize it by client group with subfolders for people or departments within that client group. For example, when I worked for a large pension fund, I supported the offices of the CFO, the CRO and the COO. Those were my top folders. Under each top folder, I had a list of departments that reported into it. For example, under CFO, I had subfolders for Finance, Actuarial, and Investment Operations. And within Finance, I had subfolders for the SVP, FP&A, and Reporting. I also had folders for my direct reports, my boss, and a folder called Projects, with subfolders of each project I was working on. Once the system is in place, processing emails become a lot easier.

When an email enters my inbox, I immediately read it and decide what to do with it. If it’s an action email, I enter the task into my task manager, then file the email immediately into the folder that makes the most sense. If I need to reference the email when I respond, I leave it in my inbox. If I have to forward the email to someone else to get an answer, I leave it in my inbox until I get the answer. This also serves as a follow-up because if I haven’t received an answer in a reasonable time, I can follow-up with the person. As soon as the email is actioned, and I’ve responded to it, I file it away. This keeps my inbox clean, and I know the only emails I have in there are ones that need work. Also, it makes finding old emails so easy as they’re all neat and organized in folders.

Track Tasks and Projects

Last but certainly not least, I have a method to track my tasks and projects that ensures I never forget I have to do something. You can use whatever tool makes sense to you. Over the years, I’ve experimented with many tools; Outlook tasks, Outlook calendar, Google tasks, Todoist, OneNote, Evernote.

The one I’ve landed on, that has made my life immeasurably simple is Asana. Asana is a free online project management tool, with a handy phone app that ensures you have access to your tasks and projects wherever you are. There are tons of learning resources on Asana online, so I won’t get into the technical details now, but it has completely changed my life. Not only do I track my projects, tasks, due dates in Asana, I also track my client conversations on it. I set up a separate project for each major client group (similar to my email folders). I can scan and attach my handwritten notes into the project. And when I have a task from a meeting with that client, I can enter it with a due date. All incomplete tasks show up in my Asana inbox. An added bonus: it makes year-end performance review time SO easy!

I hope this helped you see that the craziness doesn’t have to be part of your daily life. And now I’d love to hear from you. How do you stop the crazy in your life?

If you like these tips, head on over to http://www.carasconsulting.com and sign up for our weekly emails full of advice and tips to help you be the best HR Business Partner they’ve ever had!