In our team and, in general, in our organization, it is always important to try to highlight our work by showing the value we bring to the company on a daily basis, regardless of whether the culture of our team is more transparent or more opaque. Bringing visibility to your team and your direct manager is not only a good practice that benefits you on an individual level, but it directly impacts the team's confidence and performance. Before we start defining the 5 must-haves we recommend from Uphint to provide visibility to your work, let's first understand why it is so advantageous to do this regularly with your managers and team.
Here are the main advantages:
In general, transparency leads to trust. Making certain information visible will have an impact on a healthier work environment and work processes.
Visibility undoubtedly helps to be more present at key moments where your work will be taken into account. If you make your work known and have a good professional attitude, individual recognition will soon follow.
If you actively participate in projects that are not so closely related to your usual work, it will also be seen in a very positive light. We recommend that you always be on the lookout for these opportunities and do not close yourself off.
Undoubtedly, one of the most important advantages. Regularly sharing documents, tasks and challenges will help the rest of the team better understand the overall progress of the project and collaborate more effectively.
Exposing your progress can spark constructive conversations regarding a challenge or task you are tackling. These dialogues allow you to capture different points of view that help you become a better professional.
Every day, we handle a large amount of information in our head and, on many occasions, we do not use the appropriate tools and actions to bring visibility to the team. So, these are our 5 must-haves that you cannot miss:
These managers make sense if you work in a team and everyone has their own profile within the platform. If this is not the case and you do not see it feasible, you can skip this point if you consider it necessary. On the other hand, if you have the option to implement a project manager in your team, do it without hesitation, as it multiplies your productivity x30 and is the perfect ally to generate visibility of your work at all levels. You will get a better project management process.
Trello is the best known tool of all project managers, because of its simplicity, but once you have learned how Trello works, we recommend you try making the leap to tools like Asana or Clickup, as they have more features available to make collaborative work go up a level.
In many work processes it is necessary to handle sensitive information that must be visible to some collaborators. For this use case where you need to request and/or share information, we recommend that you try the free version of Parallel.
Parallel's platform allows you to both request data and documents, as well as add them on your own, always acting in a secure environment. It is perfect for transmitting sensitive (such as internal documentation) and relevant information between colleagues.
If you belong to a back-office team and handle customer or employee documentation constantly, you will surely find it useful.
Many jobs can be "scripted" because they are repetitive and recurring. For instance, if you are a salesperson working your LinkedIn network, you probably follow a more or less repetitive manual process for networking on LinkedIn. Document it to make your work visible so that others can benefit from your knowledge.
In addition, if you generate guides and tutorials for the rest of the team, you will be seen as a reference employee for everyone, a fact that will not go unnoticed in the eyes of your managers.
Uphint will help you with this. Our platform allows you to create and share these step-by-step guides and processes, so that others can be trained or inspired by your work. You can see how it works by reading the step-by-step guide template.
An up-to-date and well-managed calendar is perfect for providing visibility to your team about your availability and, if you're interested, about what keeps you busy. By managing your professional calendar well, you will not only make it easier for them to respect your work schedules, but you can also give visibility of your open fronts in terms of projects and tasks.
It is important that you are precise with the description of your calendar events so that you do not create ambiguity about what keeps you busy. If there is a culture in your team where it is well seen to place personal events, you can add some that you feel comfortable with, if not, you can always block hours in your calendar with private events so you don't give out more information.
You can do this in both Google Calendar and Outlook, which are the most common professional calendars.
A retrospective is the exercise of reflecting on past results, professional goals and events. Normally, annual, quarterly or monthly retrospectives are done where each specific period of time is analyzed. You can conduct these exercises individually or with your team, however, doing them and sharing them with managers and teams provides condensed visibility into how things are going. It is very important that the retrospectives also reflect a sense of self-criticism and a drive for continuous improvement, so don't forget to include ideas for improvement on the retrospective document.
This strategy is very good for indirectly informing whoever you want about your work focuses. Putting in copy or blind copy of your emails to your managers, for example, shows that you are attending to a project or are involved in the resolution of a specific issue. This action shows that you care about providing visibility of your work focuses so that everyone is "on the same page".
In conclusion, giving visibility in our daily work is fundamental for personal growth and the good work of the team. It is good to look out for our own interests, but it is smarter to think about helping the team with the visibility we bring to them. This is our way of seeing and approaching it, that the visibility of our work is a means to generate constructive conversations about everyone's work. We hope that you have already started to integrate some of the 5 must-haves that we have proposed.
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