Project onboarding can significantly impact the success (or failure) of your project.

Let me show you how.

So your boss hands you a new project to run and mentions that some people are already lined up to help get it done. Great, you think. You call the first one on the list, but they don’t really know anything about the project beyond the fact they’ve been ‘volunteered’ by their team leader.

This is where you switch into onboarding mode.

As a project manager, one of the first things to do is get the project team together. You need to build a team that has a common goal and that knows how the work is going to get done. That doesn’t happen overnight but you can certainly influence the speed (and willingness) of people to get involved with your project if you introduce them to the work in a structured way.

In this article, I’ll share my top tips for onboarding new people to a project team. I’ll also draw on the experience of other practicing project managers who have shared their stories so you can quickly get your projects off the ground with a team that knows what to do. To jump to a specific section click the link below.

• The stakeholder life cycle
• Project onboarding: Getting the team engaged
• Project onboarding: why the project is important
• Project onboarding: Build long-lasting, positive relationships
• Using checklists for project onboarding
• Project onboarding: Next steps

Alternatively, just keep scrolling.
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Mike Nemeroff is the co-founder and CEO of RushOrderTees. An entrepreneur from an early age, Mike and his siblings started a small screen printing business in their garage as teens and RushOrderTees was born. Under Mike’s leadership, the business has grown into the $75 million dollar ecommerce company that it is today with more than 225 employees.

Everyone wants to have a successful business, but getting there can be a challenge. Your team can make or break a project. For that reason, you need to surround yourself with individuals who can provide an added boost to your production levels.

Who should you choose for your team?

It takes all personality types to successfully manage a team and pull them towards your objectives. You need to find the right people who can work together and motivate others to meet your business needs.

The best types of team members give your business the right momentum and direction while providing open communication. Running a business can be difficult, but finding the most qualified people to fill those vital roles is even more complicated. You need to choose individuals who are willing to support, guide, and even challenge your ideas.

This Process Street post will walk through the four best personalities that can help run a successful organization:

• Workplace personality #1: The Leader
• Workplace personality #2: The Task Manager
• Workplace personality #3: The Abstract Thinker
• Workplace personality #4: The Champion

Let’s dive in!
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It’s 4 p.m. and you’ve got a welcome call with your newest team member. Ideally, you’d feel full of life, ready to welcome her with enthusiasm and get her excited about the weeks to come.

Problem is, this is your 6th video call of the day and you’re overrun with Zoom fatigue.

You’ve been turned “on” (not in a good way) for the last 7 hours and are severely lacking in enthusiasm, let alone excitement.

The worst thing is, the majority of those meetings were unnecessary, everything covered in them could’ve been communicated asynchronously.

Simply put, asynchronous communication involves communicating remotely without expecting an immediate response. This can be done via iMessage, pre-recorded video/audio, making suggestions to an existing project (think: Google Docs/Sheets, Github, Jira).

The challenge is knowing, when and how to use synchronous vs. asynchronous communication methods. Fortunately, this post is here to teach you just that so you can avoid Zoom fatigue and stop being real-time, all the time. Feel free to skip to a specific section of the post using the links below.

• What is Zoom fatigue?
• Avoid Zoom fatigue by making sure communication is always intentional
• Avoid Zoom fatigue: Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication
• Advantages and disadvantages of synchronous vs. asynchronous communication
• Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication tools at Process Street
• Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication: Wrapping up

Let’s get started!
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I love winning.

It doesn’t matter what’s involved or what the prize is, I’ll do what I can to achieve my goal of clinching that ‘winner’ title.

When I was 6, my primary school held an egg and spoon race as part of its sports day activities. The prize was a yardstick of chocolate. Let’s just say that, by lunchtime, there were tears and tantrums elsewhere while my face was smeared with chocolate.

To this day, I’m still (perhaps unhealthily) incentivized by goals. Particularly in the workplace. I’m not alone in this though, as numerous studies show that goal-setting improves employee performance and engagement.

Do you relish winning, too?

And do you want the next quarter to be your team’s best quarter ever?

Then you need to know about OKRs (objectives and key results). It’s basically an adult version of the egg and spoon race.

That’s why, in this short, informative Process Street post, I’ll define OKRs, describe their business benefits, give advice on how to write solid OKRs, and also provide OKR examples from the likes of Google.

Just make your way through the following sections to learn all about OKRs:

• What is an OKR?
• The business benefits of the OKR methodology
• How to write inspiring, useful OKRs
• 3 OKR examples — including ones Google use
• Moving forward as an OKR-aligned team

Now, let’s make this quarter more than OK.

Let’s make it internally record-breaking, thanks to OKRs!

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I’d say we’ve all heard of the metaphor of the “glass ceiling”, right?

Here is a definition for those who need some clarification:

U.S. Department of Labor

The term became popularized in the 80s/90s where it was commonly used to describe the professional challenges women faced during that period.

Despite the advancements made in women’s rights since the 1980s, the metaphor of the glass ceiling is still very much valid today. Not just for women, but for minority groups and individuals as well.

Fortunately, we appear to be moving in the right direction when it comes to inclusivity in the workplace. 80% of employees consider inclusion to be an essential factor in choosing an employer and 69% of executives rate diversity and inclusion as an important issue.

But, what does it take to create a sense of inclusivity in the workplace?

In fact, what does inclusivity actually mean? And, how does it differentiate itself from diversity?

This Process Street blog post hopes to answer these questions (and more). Keep scrolling for an introduction on workplace inclusion and ten actionable strategies and metrics that’ll help to increase inclusivity within your organization or line of work.

Or alternatively, to jump to a specific section by clicking the links below:

• Understanding inclusivity and diversity
• 10 strategies to create an atmosphere of inclusivity in the workplace & their metrics
• Inclusivity in the workplace: Useful tools
• Inclusivity in the workplace: Further resources

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This is a guest post from Mile Živković, a content writer and work-life balance expert at Chanty – a simple and AI-powered Slack alternative. When Mile isn’t busy writing epic posts on productivity, work-life balance and time management for Chanty blog, he’s probably driving somewhere. His hobbies include cars (huge fan of Alfa Romeo), photography and collecting pocket knives. You can catch him on LinkedIn.

What do you do when there’s work to be done, email communication simply doesn’t cut it anymore and tapping your colleagues on the shoulder is not the ideal solution for communicating in the office?

You use a chat app to collaborate with your team.

With email becoming clunky and outdated and the need for rapid, instant communication at work, the market for team chat apps is ever-growing.

However, with so many options out there, making the right choice can seem impossible. Pricing, the number of users, integrations, searchable history, these are all elements to consider when making a choice for your team.

To make the process a bit easier, we’ve singled out some of the best team chat apps out there with our honest feedback. These are some of the best workplace chat apps out there and we hope we’ll make it easier on you to make a good choice. Let’s dig in!

Team chat apps: The quicklinks!

• Slack
• Chanty
• Typetalk
• Flock
• Fleep
• Microsoft Teams
• Ryver
• Glip
• Process Street

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We all strive for a better understanding of ourselves and each other, in or out of the workplace. It doesn’t matter what level of the organization you’re at.

Sometimes we want to communicate better, and develop social relations. Sometimes we want to understand how to work better, and more efficiently.

Sometimes, you may simply have an itch to try your hand at something new, whether that means picking up new responsibilities in your current position, or taking on a completely new challenge altogether.

For years, people have been attracted to personality tests. “What kind of person am I?” Presented as a series of weighted questions, you’re given a “type”, and there you have it! You have been enlightened, the long-awaited revelation of your true inner self.

Except, not exactly. The merit of such simplified personality classifications can be (and has been) debated for as long as they’ve been around, but for many people that’s not the point.

It doesn’t matter if the tests are a snapshot of your psyche at any given time, subject to the ever-changing whims and complexities of human existence. It doesn’t matter that you might be an INFJ yesterday, and a ESFJ tomorrow (well, it sort of does, but I’m trying to make a point here).

The point is, these kinds of tests are simply tools of self-analysis and self-reflection, and process improvement. It’s up to you to use these tools to gain insight into yourself and the people around you, and if you take a measured approach and combine it with a keen understanding of the underlying principles behind the popular concept of a “personality test”, you will probably uncover something valuable.

My goal in this article is to try and provide you with a couple of useful tools to better understand yourself and the way in which you work in the form of a dive into the cognitive functions set out by Carl Jung to describe the 16 different personality types that formed the basis of his psychoanalytic and psychiatric practice.

I’ll be covering:

• What are cognitive functions?
• Why you should try to understand them
• Breakdown of Jung’s 8 cognitive functions
• How the MBTI test relates to all of this
• Applying these principles to the workplace
• A free personality test
• Using Process Street to maximize your potential

By understanding the theory and definitions behind the hugely popular Myers-Briggs test and Jung’s psychological functions that preceded it, you stand to become more familiar with your own personality and by extension, more tuned-in to why you act the way you do, say the things you say, struggle with some things, and excel at others.

You will also be able to use this insight to more readily navigate the complex social arena that is professional working life. Why do certain people act and react the way they do? How can you better appreciate the differences in and between others, and the unique strengths that each individual brings to the table? Continue Reading

It is by no means easy for any organization to establish a strong identity.

It takes excellent leadership from the get-go to clearly define values, goals, and objectives that stakeholders can stand by and employees feel motivated to forward with consistent high-quality performance.

This is proving increasingly challenging for businesses as there is no clear solution, no clear method to getting it right.

But it’s time serious measures were taken to do something about it.

According to research by Deloitte, culture and engagement is the most important issue companies face around the world, with 87% of organizations citing culture and engagement as one of their top challenges, and 50% call the problem “very important.”

The importance of company culture has become increasingly important over the last couple of decades, as younger generations demand a work environment that feels nurturing, encourages collaboration, and offers challenges that keep them engaged and present opportunities to make a notable impact in some way.

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Saying “employee feedback” conjures images of awkward conversations with managers and meaningless buzzwords during performance reviews, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Feedback cycles shouldn’t try to force comments out of your team, but instead support them and let them know when and where they can raise any issues they encounter.

Doing this lets you see the flaws in your business and figure out how to take action in order to improve it for everyone involved.

It’s also a great way to get a second opinion on issue that you have lost all context on. Veteran and new employee alike offer vital second opinions and can really help to highlight where your processes are weakest, and that’s not even mentioning other benefits such as helping to make your employees feel valued.

“69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were being better recognized” – Lindsay Kolowich, 11 Eye-Opening Statistics on the Importance of Employee Feedback

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Your current team can’t handle any extra work. You’ve exhausted your process automation opportunities. You’ve got no choice but to bring in a fresh face.

You could hire a specialist, but they can be expensive and limited in the work you can hand off. You need to hire a virtual assistant.

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