Do you ever have those days when you were busy but didn't feel like you got work done? According to the Anatomy of Work Index, which surveyed over 10,000 knowledge workers around the world, the chances are high that you spend the majority of your time—60% of your day—on "work about work." As a result, the Anatomy of Work Index found that 82% of respondents feel close to burning out at work. Coordinating work across teams can be chaotic, especially when you have to sift through emails or messaging apps to gather information or stay up with projects. Managing chaos isn't rewarding, nor is it efficient. Without proper work management, teams move more slowly, miss deadlines, and fail to meet goals. With as much activity as your church generates, utilizing a tool to help your teams plan, organize, and execute work is essential.
What is work management? It's not uncommon for churches to overlook the value of systems and processes in their work environments. Work management is simply a system developed to address your organization's routine workflows, tasks, and projects to provide clarity, accountability, and rhythm. Work management offers a better approach to achieving goals more efficiently and quickly. Most of all, it allows your teams to prioritize the work that matters most. Project vs. work management While project management and work management are related, they have distinct differences. Work management includes project management and the processes and planning that support the work involved in completing projects. Project management monitors tasks that ensure a project's completion or achieved goals. A project is an endeavor or focus where team members work together to achieve a common goal. Often, team members each have their tasks that contribute to completing the project. Typically, projects, and tasks within those projects, are time-bound. Some project examples are a winter class launch, a new small group semester, a volunteer recruitment push, or a church-wide gear-up for Christmas services. A process is repeated actions or procedures to accomplish tasks. Members deploy these actions multiple times to complete projects. Examples of processes can include developing content calendars or producing weekly email newsletters and printed bulletins. Why does work management matter? We recently conducted a congregational survey as part of a coaching project for a local church. They wanted to have a clearer understanding of how effective their communications were with their congregation. Their methods felt clunky and complex, but they didn't know how this impacted a desire for a well-informed community. While they were pleasantly surprised to learn that their congregants felt well-informed, they knew the complexity of their processes still needed improvement. Managing work around a complex or confusing system was draining time and energy. They knew they could and had to do better. A key to better work management One of the critical elements to clarifying and simplifying a church's communications workflow is introducing a tool to help with work management. At ChurchCom Solutions, we use Asana (paid link), but there are other web-based options like Monday or Basecamp. While I introduced Basecamp to our church as coms director, I now recommend Asana to the churches who work with ChurchCom Solutions. Asana's free version offers robust functionality for most small to medium-sized churches to get started. And we think it's pretty significant. Choosing to use a web-based, collaborative resource to assist with work management will be a game-changer for you and your teams. Contact ChurchCom Solutions if you'd like to chat more about getting started using a work management platform. Disclosure: We may receive commissions when you click links in this post and make purchases. However, this does not influence our decision to review or recommend these resources. We recommend resources we believe in to help your church improve its communications workflow.
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AuthorDon Wambolt has over 25 years' experience in leading church communications. More Archives
February 2024
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