In this post, I talk about how to assign work remotely to employees. One of the biggest frustrations we at Orange Star have faced is having to go back two and three times on a task for an employee to get it right. Also, have been on the receiving end of this, I can honestly say it is a total drag for the employee. It not only frustrates them, but also hurts morale. Not good.
That being said, I have always assigned work tasks in groups of small related items that apply to one logical entity. For example, in my biz, that would be a series of small changes that all apply to a single web page. To me, that made sense, and it really does except for the manner in which the are assigned.
If you assign a group of tasks to an employee, you will get into a scenario where a single task could remain at 80% complete forever and you, as the employee/supervisor, will have to constantly re-evaluate that task to recall what parts are done and not done.
Although I am still occasionally guilty of this, I have gotten better. Now, I assign lots and lots of singular and very granular tasks to employees with the following rule: You must break the work down to the point that any one task can never be partially completed. It is either 100% or 0%.
I use Base Camp for this and wind up with a very long list of short to do item. I ask my employees to annotate these to do item and assign them back to me when they are done. (See my previous post on process). However, there are a number of ways to do this. I have used excel spreadsheets where they can color code a row when complete. I have used Outlook Task Assignment and a number of other means. Whatever the tool, the important thing to remember is to break down the tasks.
The next important rule here is to never mix tasks. If you create one task that, in it's completion creates more work, close the first and create second. Never leave a situation where you can say, "Well, this part is done, but the second part is not."
Everything is either 100% or 0%.
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