How You Can Manage Work Better

Coordinating work across teams can be chaotic, especially when you have to sift through emails or messaging apps to gather information or stay up to speed 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 a system that addresses an 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 importantly, it allows your teams to prioritize the most vital work.

Project vs. work management

While project management and work management are related, they have distinct differences.

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 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.

Processes are 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.

Work management includes project management plus the processes and planning that support the work in completing projects.

Why does work management matter?

We recently conducted a congregational survey as part of a coaching project for a local church to better understand how effective their communications were with their congregation. Their methods felt clunky and complex, but they needed to learn how this impacted the goal of having 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. Their free version offers amazingly robust functionality for most small to medium-sized churches. The churches we serve through our Virtual Church Assistants Program use the free version of Asana to manage their work. Click here to sign up for your free account and explore the possibilities of improving your work management. Note: This is an affiliate link, so we receive a small reward for recommending Asana. But we would recommend it regardless because of what it offers. Other web-based options like Monday or Basecamp have limited trials and free options.

Using 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.