I'm having a difficult time implementing the one on ones. I manage a team of 7 people. However, they are here, there and everywhere all the time. In fact, they are hardly in the office during business hours. They are almost always at a customer facility working long hours and I feel guilty for asking them to meet with me on top of that, but at the same time our customers pay hourly and I don't want to take away time from our customers. Any suggestions?
Offsite Employees
Would Skype (or other vido conference) be a better choice for your situation?
In reply to Offsite Employees by Donald Carroll
it's not really the
it's not really the technology that's holding me back. I'm aware of Skype, GoToMeeting, FaceTime, etc. I know how to get a hold of my people. The problem is that they are onsite at a paying customer much of the time and that there is rarely time, outside of coming in on a Sunday or calling at 2:00 am, to actually get together with each of them. I've got what basically amounts to a team of consultants. We get paid by the hour, so my customers won't want me pulling my guys off the project to talk for a 1/2 hour.
When I was in a similar
When I was in a similar position, I did the following:
Schedule *far in advance* -- 4-6 weeks in advance -- so that it's not disruptive to existing workflows, to carve out time that is paid to your directs but not billed to a client, each week. I don't like my people billed 100% of every week, this gives me no ability to do coordination, professional development, and so on.
You can use the carve-out time for O3s. They can use carve-out time for O3s with their directs, if they have any. They can use the cave-out for things that bring in new business (e.g. when sales needs an actual engineer to come in and show off to a customer, or an engineer needs to help build a proposal). You can "bank" carve-out time for professional development as described above.
1 hour/week isn't really that much -- it's 1/40th of what you're likely billing out for that junior employee, or 2.5% of their time -- only 2% if they work a 50-hour week. That gives you a one-on-one and enough time to bank to give them real professional development, or time to improve their tools and increase their effectiveness on the job, or any number of other things that benefit you in the long run.
I've never been perfect at sticking to this (maybe if I'd held that position for longer, I'd have gotten better -- I was filling in as COO at a colleague's startup while running my own, and was happy to go back to only worrying about one company), but even mostly sticking to it was a huge improvement over the previous status quo, which was billing all of the staff at 100%.
Thinking about it... if I went back, I might try tracking billable hours rather than tracking and banking the carve-out and see if that's better. I'm not sure which method I'd favor, I'd have to try it and find out.
Susan