How to Improve Team Management with BPM

Team management is a point of attention: Good leadership can lead the whole team to the top and, consequently, improve the company's results, while bad leaders can undermine the performance of even the best teams.

Therefore, it's essential to keep looking for ways to improve the management of teams within the company. How can leadership keep the team aligned and focused on results, following a good workflow and having clear processes? This is where the use of BPM comes in.

What is team management?

Let's start from the beginning. Managing a team is, in general terms, coordinating, monitoring, and guiding the people on the team so that the activities are well executed, everyone focuses on the same objectives, and people get the support they need, not only for daily activities but also to improve.

To achieve this, the leader needs to understand what the company's goal is, know the team and their potential, in order to engage people, motivate the team and maintain productivity and efficiency, ensuring the achievement of the expected results. And they need to do all this while coordinating efforts with other departments.

Thus, in order to carry out good management, leaders need to understand the best ways to optimize work, communicate clearly with their team, ensure a good work environment, and have visibility of what is going on.

How to improve team management

Understanding that good leadership encompasses both caring for people, the work itself, and the environment. Here are some points to help improve team management:

1. Good communication

Communication is the foundation of everything. It's essential to make information understandable, so that everyone can work together. By "communication", understand that you need to:

Say what is expected of each and every person, project, and task
Explain what is being done (today, this week, this month) and how
Go through why things are being done that way, and clearly assign tasks to make everything happen
Inform deadlines, obstacles, and delays - keep everyone in the loop
Listen to what people on the team have to say: After all, communication is a two-way street
Among many other things!

Communicating, talking, not assuming that everyone already knows because it was implied - this ensures alignment on the team. And alignment is crucial for everyone to work together, in harmony and without guesswork. It fosters a secure work environment, which leads to engagement and autonomy as well.

2. Clarity and visibility

This is the result of good communication, and also good records of what's communicated. It's not as simple as "Once communicated, everyone already knows it". Leaders must ensure everything is registered and follow up, to see if everyone understood.

To do so, it's great to follow the team closely (follow, not micromanage!) and see if everything really is clear.

When it comes to visibility, there are two sides to it: Leadership needs to have visibility into what is happening, so they can understand if everything's running smoothly and there's clarity in processes, tasks, and communication. The team also needs to have visibility into tasks, agreements, deadlines, and everything else that needs to be done.

3. Workflow management

Organizing and digitally recording the workflow, which brings together most of these agreements we're talking about (who does what, when, why) is a way to keep the team organized, with clarity and visibility into the processes.

A workflow, especially for repetitive tasks (e.g., the marketing team receiving a briefing, or the HR team carrying out an onboarding process, or sales process, and so on), is of great value to managing the team — it helps to standardize deliveries and ensure clarity of responsibilities and accountability, which increases ownership and productivity.

4. Focus on results

Once the communication and the processes are in order, and everyone's engaged in the workflow, it's time to look at the deliverables and understand if the desired result is imminent.

We fixed the previous three points precisely to be able to focus on results. And for the team to focus on results, having communicated where we want to get there in the first point was crucial. Alignment always helps!

5. Taking an interest in the team

Well, the team's doing their job, everyone has visibility and clarity, good communication, and defined workflows. But the role of leadership is also to engage, motivate, and develop the people on the team. There's no way to do this without taking a real interest in each individual on the team.

What does that mean? Listening and interacting daily, even if only to ask how the day was, understanding ambitions and fears, knowing what each one wants and needs to develop, and also where they shine.

This also includes maintaining a pleasant environment within the team, managing conflicts, and giving regular feedback in a planned way - all of that with active listening at the same time.

BPM: The best support for leadership

Something that can help a lot to apply the 5 points above is the use of a BPM (Business Process Management) platform. Qntrl is a good example:

Communication: Tasks, commitments, deadlines, and projects can be registered on the BPM platform, so that everyone can track them.
Clarity and visibility: If everything is recorded there, in addition to being clearer, everyone can check, review, and clarify doubts.
Workflow management: On a BPM platform, it's possible to set up the workflow, assign tasks with deadlines, monitor deliveries and delays, and check bottlenecks—all this in a digitized way and with the whole team updating it in real time.
Focus on results: You can closely monitor the day-to-day progress of projects without having to be on top of people, asking questions all the time, which gives the team space to develop and deliver the necessary results. Besides, it's possible to foresee route deviations, obstacles, or delays, to sort them out before they become a problem.
Interest in the team: If you notice that someone is always late with task X, you can act to help solve that. Of course, in this regard, a good old conversation with the person helps more, but the use of BPM can give signs of when a conversation is needed.