As a business, we talk a lot about the importance of communication. Communicating to our clients, to our trades and suppliers and internally to our staff.
While it is easy to establish that as a team we make a commitment to effective communication, it can prove very difficult to put this into practice. Too often communication seems to fall short, resulting in an inefficient dynamic with little objective measure of accountability and a relationship fraught with distrust.
The best intentions can quickly unravel in the face of a disjointed or fractured communications strategy; or through the lack of any formal strategy at all. It is easy to fall into a trap of assuming that your team will just figure it out because you believe that everyone will understand the end goal of happy clients and a profitable outcome.
This is a place I have been; I now clearly understand that if we don’t establish a clear expectation on how we will communicate as a team we will never truly deliver on our brand promise of building that better home.
To that end, we have begun to establish a very structured format to ensure we not only communicate effectively but also ensure accountability to that brand promise every day.
The 1st step was to establish a set of core values we could all measure against; this in and of itself begins to establish some accountability and build a better foundation of trust. Our core values were developed together as a team. We all came together to establish we wanted to be a team that was positive, reliable and believed in high performance.
We then established a short, (7 min or less) daily huddle call for the core team. The focus of the call is two-fold; the delivery of some good news on personal or work successes providing a great opportunity to acknowledge team members on notable achievements and generally generate some positive energy to help everyone start their day; and to allow each person to share with the team their outlook for the day or week.
If all is well they are green, concerned about a deliverable then yellow and if really stuck then red. Very quickly the entire team has a sense of where every project is on that day. The establishment of trust and confidence begin. We are on track or a have “heads up” that someone might need some help.
Additionally while we always have established exactly what the schedule of construction looked like and would typically break it down to a 3-week look-ahead we had never formally tied this back to the daily outcomes required to hit our 3-week goals let alone the quarterly or final goals and outcomes.
So to complement the 3 week look ahead and better connect our site teams to the ultimate milestone goals the sites now display on a white board each of the daily tasks required to successfully deliver on the 3-week look-ahead.
Tying this all together we have formalized or strategic planning through establishing clear long term, short term and quarterly goals and actions. We have received invaluable help from the Whistler Chamber of Commerce through their spring Brand Camp seminar series.
The guidance we are receiving from our business coach Shannon Byrne Susko and her best-selling book the Metronome Effect has been instrumental in helping us change for the better.
If your core values reflect ours, a positive reliable performance, and would like to learn more about how our team delivers on our promise of healthy high-performance homes for happy families please give me a call.
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We specialize in building custom homes and renovations in the picturesque Sea-to-Sky Corridor, including Whistler, Squamish, North Vancouver, West Vancouver, and Pemberton.