Valeska I. Jacques

Accountability is a common problem in the workplace and the demand to find a working model for accountability is challenging. Everyone is different in their personal work and communication styles and the challenge in getting everyone to work together effectively takes a series of steps to ensure each one is creating ownership of how they affect each other in the workplace.

Without accountability you are experiencing:
• Excuse making
• Finding faults
• Misunderstandings

The series of articles that we will discuss is how communication, process, and internet tools may come together as a stepping stone to build an accountable working model.

The following suggestions will help create accountability, prevent blame, and instill good communication into your team environment.

Delegation

Robert Shapiro, former Chairman and CEO of Monsanto said:

“If you could get every person to be 30% more effective in performing their jobs, not by working harder and not by working smarter in ways that have already been tapped, but by becoming 30% more effective in working together, you’d be way ahead of you industry.”

One way of effectively delegating responsibilities with web software is using to do’s and milestones as tools to help manage tasks surrounding your project. If you take the project management system, Basecamp for example, you may use milestones to allow your team to schedule their time. These web tools allow everyone to have a calendar system to refer to in order to understand overall deliverables and ensure an effective working environment.
1. Eliminate the wasted time spent to collectively sort through tons of emails and message threads to obtain real-time project status.
2. Eliminate the wasted time spent following up on items we need to move forward on to complete projects. i.e. overall status reporting, and next step direction (I like to call this the baton pass)….
3. Eliminate confusion about where a project is and who’s responsible for the next step for completion.
4. Create a realistic project roll out so we deliver our projects/services on time, every time with 100% satisfaction by effectively managing both client expectations and production resources.

Encourage everyone to actively follow milestone delegation and contribute thoughtful feedback and ideas to continuously to improve the effectiveness of using this tool.

An upcoming article on Consistency will go into detail as to why it will help employees stick to performance standards.