Featured

Top StarAgent Tips To Keep Your Team On Track

By Nimmi
No Comments

While you sip your morning brew ☕ and meticulously think about the days that have gone, just ask yourself this: how well are your team members organized? How motivated and collaborated are they? How are you encouraging them to work productively?

Managers like you and your team members equally deal with an ample amount of tasks and work every day. Amidst cracking lengthy to-do lists, juggling tasks and projects, responding to emails, and jumping in and out of endless zoom calls and meetings, do you think like everyone from your team is riding cloud nine? As per the takeaways from 2020 Gallup State of the US Workplace study, barely one-third of the 100 million individuals are effectively engaged at work. The rest of the employees are either actively disengaged or not at all engaged – means, they finish off tasks without any wish to make contributions to their agency’s success.

Oh now, you may spill your coffee in shock, but that will simply make another mess for you to clean out! 😜 Fortunately, there are some sure-fire processes that you can adapt and practice to develop and nurture a highly productive and collaborative team by using StarAgent talent agency management software! Now, let’s take a deep dive into them!

#1 Plan And Prioritize Your Team’s Tasks

As you may know, the employees of your agency handle a lot of projects and tasks for different clients every day. Trying to tackle all of them at once can ultimately lead to utter chaos. So, it would be best if you could take up the cudgels for them by prioritizing the works you assign. However, prioritizing tasks can be a formidable challenge for managers. But with StarAgent and an appropriate method in place, prioritization of works can be more comfortable than ever.

To help you out, let’s introduce to you the ALPEN – a time management method founded by a German time management specialist, Prof. Lothar J. Seiwert, which you can successfully implement in your agency with the help of StarAgent. In this, the word ALPEN is an acronym for:

A

(‘Aufgaben’ – Meaning, noting down tasks): To implement this, simply create tasks on your StarAgent shared calendar for each work your team has to do, and you are done with step one. 🙌

L

(‘Länge Schätzen’ – Estimating task duration): Just creating tasks on StarAgent doesn’t present them doable. Instead, enter in estimated time duration (start time and end time) on each task to give your team a clear idea of what they can accomplish in a particular time frame.

P

(‘Pufferzeiten Einplanen’ – Devising buffer time): Sometimes, your task may take longer than your estimated time. So, while entering in your task duration, add in a fifteen minutes buffer time along with the estimated time, to stay on the safer side.

E

(‘Entscheidungen Treffen’ – Making decisions): Now that you can get a big picture of the tasks of your entire team on the StarAgent Calendar. Of these, all employees may have more than one task. So, the next step is to prune each person’s task list by prioritizing. For this, you may use the Eisenhower Matrix, where you can sort tasks into FOUR different categories:

What are the most important as well as urgent tasks? Label such tasks as “Do this first“.
What are the important but not urgent tasks? Label such tasks as “Do it on the next day“.
What are the urgent but not important tasks? Label such tasks as “Mid-level priority“.
What are not urgent as well as unimportant tasks? Delete these tasks for now or label them as “Low priority“.

NB: These labels are just a few examples from our end. You can edit them as per your convenience.

Now, on your StarAgent calendar, you can implement this process by entering in these labels in the description part of each task, so that your team members can realistically determine which needs to be worked on first, second, third and so on.

N

(‘Nachkontrolle’ – Following up): Now follow up with the project progresses to check if any employee is free to take on new tasks so that you can reassign tasks or projects accordingly to balance each individual’s workload. This will allow you to move mountains as you advance.

#2 Do Effective Self-Management

Self-management is something that everyone from your team can make use of to manage workloads efficiently to bring out less-stressed individuals, and collectively, a more productive team. To facilitate successful self-management among your employees, all you need to do is to implement the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach with StarAgent.

The working of this is simple – ask your team members to start things off every day by choosing to view the tasks allotted for them (by selecting their username) on the StarAgent’s User Calendar. Let them identify tasks by priority and clarify everything they have to do. Guide them to set up self reminders, if needed. At this stage, each member will know what exactly they should be doing. So, now let them engage and get to work. 🤝

#3 Search In StarAgent To Find Just About Anything

Raise your hand if you are someone who loves to spend hours searching for tasks and project details, or talent and client info. ✋

Bueller?

Well, searching for that one person is like hunting for a needle in the haystack; however, that has been experienced by the majority of the employees. Surveys affirm that the average employees spend around 60 per cent of their working hours shuffling between at least ten tools per day to locate the information they need.

That’s exactly where the StarAgent’s ‘Search’ feature comes in handy. Once your team starts doing all work in StarAgent, its ‘Search‘ and ‘Advanced Search‘ options enable everyone from the team to quickly surface any tasks assigned to them, talent profiles needed to do the work, and client details to send invoices and more.

You can run simple searches by typing into the main search bar in the top of the logged-in screen to get a list of related projects, talent profiles, and client details that match your search term. This type of search is useful when you are trying to locate something in StarAgent quickly.

Instead, if you wish to run an ad hoc search based on a host of parameters, you can try the ‘Advanced Search’ options. This will help you to find what you are looking for, even if you can’t remember exactly the details about what you require. For instance, if you are unable to recollect the talent name, you can search based on age, gender, nationality, past experience, lifestyles, features, and more. This can also help to narrow the scope of your search results if you wish to find talents with certain specifications according to your clients’ requirements.

#4 Make Your Communication Count

Just think about keeping track of one of your projects in an email chain? Multiply the number of projects with the total number of employees you have. Yuck! 🤦 No surprise why you start every day with sky-high pressure.

Alas, there is certainly a more reliable way of making your people work better together – and that is with the built-in chat system on StarAgent! With this, StarAgent makes it easier to share one-on-one messages through private communication and other announcements with employees across your agency through different channels, so that they can easily find the information needed, whenever they wish.

StarAgent comes with a default #general channel; so creating new channels required for your team is your first step. With that being said, you don’t have to create dozens of channels at a time when you start. Rather, you can choose to add just:

A channel to share team updates, e.g. #Team_Updates
Separate channels for each existing projects, e.g. #Project-Nike-Fashion-Show

✨Pro Tip: When you create channel names, make sure to do it logically. For instance, when you choose names such as #Team_Updates, the channel’s purpose is clear to everyone from your agency, and that can avoid any unnecessary confusions.

Take Back Your Time And Uncover More

This is never the end of what StarAgent modelling agency software can do for your tasks. If these actions did enable you to manage yourself and encourage your team to work better – bravo, you have conquered some of the biggest killers of productivity! 👏

Anyhow, cheers to the goal of getting ahead, we’ll be back soon with more mystical powers of StarAgent.

Better talent management

starts here