When your organization falls into a rhythm of letting deadlines slip by, it can be tough to get things turned around. Missed deadlines have a cascading effect. Your meeting administrator needs reports to build the agenda, and when those reports are running late, their agenda will come in late as a result.
You may want to be stricter and enforce deadlines, but that’s tough when you consider the hard work and dedication of your team. It’s not that your staff is sitting idle while the deadlines slip away; you know they’re busy, and that’s exactly why they can’t always meet the deadlines you’ve established.
The best thing you can do is support your staff by providing the right tools and structure to more effectively manage their time and increase the efficiency and speed of completing tasks. Additionally, you should build a consistent procedure to deal with missed deadlines.
eScribe meeting management software is a great starting point. This cloud-based meeting solution helps build meeting agendas based on reports and helps your entire team track deadlines. It helps your staff build their schedules around deadlines and provides an efficient framework for submitting reports and integrating them into your meeting agenda automatically.
Plan Your Year
It’s important to have an idea about future deadlines to best manage your time.
eScribe allows you to build far-out deadlines into your year which allows your staff to work far in advance and stay organized.
If a team member comes across some information that applies to a deadline six months in the future, they can start their report in advance and apply it to that deadline. When it comes time to finish the report, that information will be there waiting for them.
Having the entire year planned out will help your staff get an idea about what to expect in the coming months and quarters and allow them to build a better long-term schedule.
Manage Reports: Submitted or Not
With eScribe’s report management system, you can clearly define reports and deadlines for your staff on one consistent interface.
This provides the benefit of putting all of the information together. Completed reports are easy to access, and incomplete reports and missed deadlines are highly visible.
Whether reports are completed on time or not, having all of that information in one place makes planning much smoother.
Visual Cues and Reminders
The urgency of deadlines increases as the date approaches.
eScribe’s deadline management interface uses a simple colour scheme that helps staff members prioritize their time around the most urgent deadlines. Grey deadlines are farther out, and the colour evolves through yellow, and finally red to represent the deadlines as they advance. With just a quick glance at their work due, your staff members can pick out the most urgent task to work on.
Additionally, eScribe generates reminder emails and send them to your staff to remind them of deadlines. The system provides automated accountability that will keep your team members on track to hit those deadlines!
Build Smart Agendas
With submitted reports and any tasks not completed tracked by the same software, eScribe generates a meeting agendas automatically. They are fully customizable, but the automated agenda makes planning meetings a much faster process.
Not only does the solution create an agenda, it makes submitting and distributing agendas a quick and efficient process. This cuts your meeting planning time into a fraction of what it used to be and will help you hit your meeting deadlines!
Late Submission Approval
Once you’ve given your staff the tools to stay on track with their deadlines, it’s time to actually build a policy around missed deadlines.
In the normal process of submitting a report, your staff member might turn their work over to their direct supervisor for review who, in turn, uses that information to report to their superior and so on up the leadership chain to the most senior member of the organization.
You might want to consider building a late submission approval procedure into your organization’s policy that requires late reports to be submitted directly to senior management for approval. This is motivating to your staff members to meet deadlines, and it will help the senior leadership in your organization better control the content of your meetings. This powerful tool increases the visibility on late reports which reduces the frequency of late submissions.
With a few changes and the right tools, hitting those deadlines will be no problem. Help your staff help you!