It’s time to make sure your processes are updated to help you manage a growing team.

When it was just you, it was easy to track what you needed from your clients. Now that you’ve got others on your team, you need to account for a few things. It’s time to set up some team management systems to make managing your team easier, for you and them.

If you’ve have a fairly solid system down, it should be easy to make a few tweaks to make them more team-friendly. 

Get out of your inbox and into a PM tool

If you’re running a team, communicating and assigning tasks through your email isn’t going to cut it. When you’re trying to manage a growing team the key is to use a tool that helps you manage them. When you’re working from your inbox, email threads get messy. Things slip through the cracks and you can’t directly assign them something with a clear due date. My recommendation is to use a project management tool like Asana. This has been my go-to PM tool for the last seven years, and can be done with the free plan!

Update your project and team management systems

There’s a lot of ways you can setup your Asana account for team and project management. One of my OBM clients tracks client project in a single task, rather than as a whole project. The task is set up to include all the information the team would need to know/access during the project. We then use subtasks with sections to breakdown the tasks needed to complete the project. Below is a visual example of what we put in our task description so our team has everything they need.

Reorganize your Slack channels

If Slack is your primary way you communicate with your team, reorganizing and updating your channels can help streamline communication. There’s three main things I do when organizing Slack for my clients.

Setup custom channels

The basic channels Slack creates are fine to start, but to help manage a growing team you’re going to want to keep how you communicate organized. Here’s a look at some of the channels I create in my client’s Slack accounts:

• #client-company
• #contractor-name-here
• #theboardroom
• #sales
• #standupmeeting

Client channel — create a client-specific channel so that any conversations about that client’s project can be done within that channel. Add all of the team members who’ll be working on that project to the channel so they can stay in the loop as the project progresses.

Contractor channel — create a contractor/team member-specific channel and anytime you need to communicate with them directly outside of any other channels, do so within this channel. This channel makes more sense if you have an OBM on your team who needs to be in those conversations as well. Otherwise, you can skip this channel type and stick with DMs.

The Boardroom — for one of my clients we have a few high-level people (CEO, OBM, Creative Director, Project Manager) that need to be in the loop on things across the business. This channel is where we talk about things that only us four need to be in the loop on. Once we’ve finished discussing things we’ll move the finalized conversation/decision to the relevant channel to bring the rest of our team in the loop.

Sales — this channel is specific to any leads/booking/sales conversations and may just be for you and your OBM. Set up a Zap where any new leads that come in get added here to discuss if they’re a good fit and we’d like them to book a call.

Standup Meeting — if you’re tired of having weekly calls with your team but want to keep a pulse on what they’re up to and more, this is a great option. For my clients I’ve set up a weekly Zap that sends a custom message asking what they’re working on that week, if they’ll be out at all, and a highlight from their weekend.

This message helps us to get a look at what they’re working on, if they’ll be unavailable at any point during the week so we can adjust accordingly, and so we can encourage our team to get to know each other personally. We often share photos from our weekend, and can bond as a virtual team.

Start threading for all conversations

This is probably the most important one for clear, organized communication in a Slack account. You can see an example of threading conversations above. In short, you’re hitting “reply” whenever someone sends a message in Slack. This neatly nests the conversation directly into the original message. That way, you can see the major conversation points rather than the entire conversation (especially when they get over 20!).

Encourage emojis for message acknowledgements

There’s nothing more frustrating than sending out a message in Slack and not knowing if it was seen or not. Try requesting that your team “acknowledge” they’ve seen the message, whether they’re working on it or not yet. Here’s 3 examples of how we’ve taught our team to react to messages:

• 👀 — I’ve seen your message and will respond/act in a bit
• 👍 — Sounds good / I’ve got it. Use this one if you need to confirm it’s been seen and not action is needed
• ✅ — Done. If it’s a task request and I’ve completed it, I’ll react with this so it shows it’s been done. In the Sales channel though, we use this one to also confirm they’re an approved lead

Adjust your account login settings

For the love of happy systems, if you’re trying to manage a growing team, don’t create accounts that login via a third party.

If you’re doing this, it means that you’re going to have to give your team access to that gmail account. This means they can then login to any other account connected to that gmail account. It’s going to be rare that you want someone on your team to have access to your gmail account.

Final tip to manage a growing team

It may seem obvious, but not everyone loves to actually manage their team. While you can create team management systems, someone is going to have to actually manage the team. If you love Asana, and are ready to get ongoing support, get in touch!