How To Keep Your Work Resolutions for 2019
Welcome to 2019! With a new year often comes New Year’s Resolutions — many of which don’t actually make it past January 31st. But Hive is here to offer up five work resolutions that you can actually stick to this year, along with tips on how to achieve them by using Hive. These tips will help you save time and work more efficiently. Who doesn’t want that?
1. Eliminate Unnecessary Meetings
There are few things worse than opening up your calendar on a Monday morning and seeing three hours of meetings that could easily be solved by a quick check-in on a Hive action card, or via Hive chat. Worse still, meetings often make you less productive.
The purpose of meetings is to review the status of items and to solve for any major issues, but there are better ways to communicate internally. Our solution? Hive’s Milestone Summary View.
Mark major deliverables across your projects as milestones, and then use Summary View in Hive to collect a list of all the “hot” items that you’d be covering in those meetings. Select “Show Milestones,” which will highlight the major items that need to be discussed.
2. Streamline Communication
For many organizations, email is the proverbial glue that holds people together. While email is a great tool for connectivity, endless streams of emails can hinder productivity, and consolidating communication is a great work resolution to make going into the New Year. Enter Hive Mail, launching January 15th.
Hive Mail is a first-of-its-kind productivity integration — it ingests the mail from your inbox (Gmail or Outlook) into the Hive app itself, allowing you to address an email right inside Hive, and do everything from forwarding, replying, or copying items from the email into a Hive action card.
Hive Mail will help you massively reduce time toggling between Hive and your Gmail tab, increasing overall productivity.
The future is here, and it’s Hive Mail. We’ll be releasing more information on this breakthrough integration in the next week. Stay tuned!
3. Take Better Notes
Sure, people take notes in meetings. But do they actually go anywhere? Luckily, we’ve got a solution built into Hive — Hive Notes.
Hive Notes are an easy way to take notes on a meeting, discussion or brainstorm directly in Hive. Each note can be expanded into action lists and cards, which you can assign to yourself, or tag someone else on your team. You’ll never forget a post-meeting follow up again.
4. Chart Yearly Growth with Key KPIs
It’s difficult to do your job, or expect others to do theirs, when there aren’t clear goals or metrics provided. It’s especially important to develop a strategic plan at the start of the year and create a roadmap for the next 12 months. Hive’s Strategic Planning Template will help you do just that.
With this strategic planning template, users can map out several aspects of the planning process to help visualize what strategic success looks like for their business. This template comes with larger project phases and smaller sub-phases including customer goals, financial benchmarks, and process improvements. If the specifics of this strategic planning template do not fit your business specifications, simply edit and update each project phase and sub-task.
If you want to plan by quarter, try transforming phases into five categories: Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 and Annual. You can then label each initiative based on the timeline, assign subtasks within each phase, and visualize how everyone’s individual project contribute to the phases’ completion. The visibility of the template is also key — everyone will be clued into what’s on each team-members plate and how they’re all working together.
5. Showcase Your Team’s Great Work
Positive feedback on work well done keeps employees motivated and engaged. “Employee of the Month” is so 2010. Hive Analytics Team Dashboard is the 2019 version.
The Analytics Team dashboard, which lives inside Hive Analytics, is continually updated with completed tasks and accomplishments from members of your team. This dashboard helps entire teams stay up to date on all actions assigned and completed, and keeps people engaged as major initiatives are completed. As with the strategic planning template, Hive’s Team Dashboard also ensures visibility across teams and managers, helping you stick to your work resolutions.
The team dashboard and strategic planning template can also help cut down on meetings and emails — you’ve got all the information on next steps, pressing initiatives, and goals right in Hive.
So, what are you waiting for? We dub 2019 the year of limited meetings, decreased emails, and workplace transparency. Let us know of any additional work resolutions you’re aiming for in 2019 in the comments below.
