We do! But I have to admit, the “how” was not on our radar. It popped up during research with 24 countries. I’d like to share this magnificent insight with you.

“If you can see how I have planned my day, you don’t need to micromanage me – give feedback and let me get on with it!”

I found this inspiring. Young team leaders describing how they would like to reimagine the process of “managing upwards” and striving for individual hyper-productivity.

Quite reasonably they want the freedom to work from anywhere – office, home or traveling “workations”. They don’t want to sit on 2-3 video calls per day for the sake of achieving transparency, accountability and engagement.

They’d rather have live transparency, efficient peer and boss feedback, and minimal disruptions that empower a sense of let me get on with it!

“As a leader I want to coach and support my team. If I can see their work calendar overlaid with how they have planned their day, I can help without slowing them down.”

Across those 24 countries we researched, progressive team leaders, managers and business owners had no interest in being “big brother” and nearly all of those interviewed were relaxed about how individuals schedule their days to optimize for work-life balance.

Progressive leaders want to do everything they can for their teams to succeed.

Below is a new innovation from stratappsaas.com, showing 3 team members. You’ll notice personal to-do’s and personal calendar events are removed from this shared view:

sharing

Progressive teams can use this shared view on their daily standups, making those standups fast and effective, especially when working remotely or as part of a cross-border team.

With this shared view team leaders can proactively help with:

  • Are we working on the right things?
  • Can I distribute the workload more fairly across my team?
  • Why are some things planned to take so much time? [Interestingly, in our research team members described this as the number one challenge in managing upwards, in that their boss did not truly understand the time it takes to get certain things done, so by having this live shared view it becomes much easier to proactively manage expectations upwards.]

Ask yourself as a leader: “If my team planned each day like this, transparent to each other, would that take our collective productivity, including the speed of collaboration and decision-making, to a whole new level?

From our 24-country research, the answer was yes!

Next-gen workforce is comfortable with transparency – we older folks may take a little time to adjust.

I’m not talking about bathroom selfies!  The next generation has no problem with working transparently.

In fact, they thrive on transparency.  They feel motivated and create momentum by sharing with and helping each other.

Personally I find this refreshing and inspiring.  

Whilst no one in our research cohort across the 24 countries would insist on it, there is an increasing expectation from next-gen workers for two-way transparency.  That is, next-gen team members gain motivation from seeing and feeling a part of what their boss is working on each day.

stratappsaas.com allows you to achieve transparency and efficient collaboration both ways, with appropriate levels of privacy built in for when you need it, such as:

  • Making the sharing view (i.e. image above) opt-in by invitation and acceptance
  • Being able to mark certain work to-do’s as confidential
  • Automatically removing personal to-do’s and personal calendar events from the sharing view

Free Time Management App

stratappsaas.com is a free-for-individuals time management app that makes it easy for you to achieve collective transparency in a way that fuels trust, speed and hyper-productivity.

The app updates your capacity and planned finish time as your day progresses.

It automatically schedules your to-do’s around your work and personal calendar events. Not only that, it presents all of this to you on one screen on your mobile and one page on your desktop, and if you have an assistant they can help manage your day by accessing the desktop view.

Mastering Time Management

You may also like to take a deeper dive with this article on mastering time management.