How to Improve Team Productivity with the Weekly Cadence
How to Improve Team Productivity with the Weekly Cadence
Each day of the week gets a job that supports the business priorities for that week.
The concept is fairly simple: Each day of the week gets a job that supports the business priorities for that week.
Monday: What are the priorities for the week?
Tuesday: What projects support those priorities?
Wednesday: What blockers are we encountering?
Thursday: What can we do to push projects through the red zone?
Friday: How did we do?
Let’s dive into each of these in a little more detail.
Monday’s Priorities
Here’s where we determine what the team will focus on for the week. From all the moving pieces we are working on, we select two to three team priorities to rally behind.
As an example, one week’s priorities might be:
Completing the Burnout Webinar final preparations and promotion
Continuing our preparations for the Momentum App launch
These priorities represent or align with larger objectives at the monthly level or quarterly level, and connect those broader planning horizons with the “get-the-work-done” weekly and daily planning.
We tend to keep our weekly priorities to three or less because:
Three or fewer priorities are easy to remember and keep top of mind.
The team has other responsibilities and routines to complete in addition to the weekly projects/priorities.
Typically we go over these priorities and discuss any discrepancies at our Monday Team Huddle, so we can start the week aligned.
Tuesday’s Projects
Tuesday is when we follow up on specific projects that support the priorities for the week. It’s when we ask questions like:
Do we have the right projects in place to move our higher-level objectives forward?
Does the team need any additional information or support to execute on this week’s projects?
Do we need to make any adjustments to team assignments to make sure enough time, energy, and attention is paid to projects that advance our objectives?
(Some of this work is done at Monday’s Huddle, when the team lists their own three individual commitments for the week.)
Since Tuesday is the day that most people’s project work begins in earnest, touching base on these points lets us see if there’s alignment (between the project and the week’s priorities), and enough capacity on the team to get everything done.
Wednesday’s Blockers
We use Wednesdays to identify any blockers coming up that might prevent the week’s projects from being completed by Friday.
Blockers could be just about anything, such as:
A delay in a vendor getting back to us
Confusion over a task or assignment (and a need for clarification or more information)
A task taking longer than expected
Another priority coming up that had to displace project work
If the team identifies any blockers (or potential blockers) mid-week, that gives us time to address them, rally the team, and finish the week strong.
Thursday’s Rally
Thursday is “red zone rally” day. Charlie talks about the creative red zone over on Productive Flourishing (and in Chapter 9 of Start Finishing): it’s the zone where we struggle with issues like competing priorities, poor team alignment, and fatigue just as we’re about to cross the goal line.
Thursdays at PF are about how we rally together as a team to make sure we’re getting that week’s footballs over the goal line. We use rally day to:
Address any blockers we identified on Wednesday
Shift the team around to make sure priority projects are adequately covered
Make sure the team has what it needs to get everything finished by Friday
Friday’s Review (and Celebrations)
As we wrap up the week, we look back at what we accomplished, how far we moved priorities forward, and celebrate the wins we had.
That’s one use of our weekly ops update: highlighting things that went well during the week, both what we accomplished individually and as a team.
We also identify ways the process didn’t serve the team or the projects, and how we can make those better. This isn’t to point fingers, but to focus on places where all of us can improve. Because we’ll be back on the field again next week!
Week to Month to Quarter... and Beyond
One of the beautiful things about this weekly cadence is how well it leads us back into the broader objectives of the business. The week’s priorities, projects, and accomplishments support and inform the month’s projects and objectives (and vice versa), our team monthly reviews support and inform our quarterly objectives and key results (OKRs), and those quarterly OKRs (and our quarterly planning and after-action reviews) support the overall direction of the business.
It’s a fruitful combination of top-down and bottom-up planning that helps our team stay aligned on our most important objectives.
Give it a try, and see how it supports your team in accomplishing your best work, week after week.
This is a guest post by , originally published July 29, 2021 on Productive Flourishing.