Five Signs that Your Team is Disorganized
Good managers by nature are “organized” people—they often are great at organizing their own work and thoughts, but their self-organization rarely carries over to the groups of people who report to them. If disorganization were easy to detect and diagnose, most managers would undoubtedly do something about it—but it’s not.
More often than not, disorganization is something that becomes deeply ingrained into the modus operandi of an organization—managers just assume they need five status meetings a week with their team because that’s how they’ve always done things. They assume they routinely need to tell their team members where they can find important documents because that’s the way things have always been.
Disorganization becomes part of the organization if it’s allowed to linger for too long, and this costs the organization thousands upon thousands of dollars of lost employee time or other resources over several years.
So how do you know if your business is suffering from endemic disorganization? How can you spot the organizational deficiencies which eat away at your time and money? Here are the five tell-tale signs that your team is disorganized:
- You constantly have to explain who, what, when, where, why, and how to your team. Even though your team has been doing this for years now, every time you ask them to do something, they bombard you with questions you’ve undoubtedly heard before. “Where do we need to go?” “What do we need to do?” “How are we supposed to do it again?” And so forth. This indicates that your team or business is organizationally challenged when it comes to training and explaining new processes to team members.
- Inconsistent results. If you ask your team to do the same thing twice, you get two completely different results; chances are your team needs better organization when it comes to quality assurance and oversight—someone needs to review work and provide honest feedback as to what the team is doing well or poorly.
- Some tasks routinely take significantly more time to complete than they should. It shouldn’t take five days to answer a customer’s tech support request; it shouldn’t take ten days to ship on order; and it shouldn’t take two hours to upload a webpage. If some of your organization’s tasks take an inexplicably long time to complete, the processes used to complete those tasks are the root cause of the organizational problem—lack of process is usually the culprit in these instances.
- Key documents / items / information routinely go missing. Your team members have a lot of trouble remembering where key pieces of information or pieces of equipment are placed. “Where’s the key for the forklift?” “Where’s last year’s shipping manifest?” And so forth. This indicates that your team has a difficult time organizing and documenting its resources, whether they are material resources or informational.
- Errors occur frequently. Things seem to go wrong and they go wrong often. This can be caused by a number of organizational issues, the most common of which is “roles and responsibilities.” Disorganized teams tend to err frequently because nobody feels that they truly own their work; thus, they feel as though any errors that occur are “somebody else’s problem.” This occurs because the roles and responsibilities of each team member are unclear or undefined.
If you recognize any of these five signs within your own team then you know you’ve got a problem with organization. What can do you to start correcting it? The first place to start is to analyze your existing processes and identify the trouble spots.
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