Practices for Effectively Assigning Team Tasks

With so many tasks to be accomplished each day, it helps to have all the information required to complete these tasks. If a task has no context assigned to it or no insight into how to approach it, productivity and morale are going to suffer. To circumvent this, you need to properly task out your team’s goals. Listed below are some practices to help.

Creating the Ideal Task

Many productivity gurus and other authorities on this topic have created a rubric to help do just this:

Step + Detail + Deadline + Context = Task

This rubric is especially useful for creating single tasks, as well as individual steps in a larger process. Listed below are these four components piece-by-piece.

Step

With each task, there is going to be some inherent action required, so you need to address what that action needs to be. Does someone need to research something, write something, or simply check into something? Tell them what needs to be done for their goal to be accomplished.

Detail

You also need to provide additional information concerning each task for context and clarity. This would include:

• The person or department who is responsible for completing this task
• The purpose of the task that they should strive to accomplish
• Why this task is critical to the overall goal
• Where any resources can be found to assist with the task and general guidance to help complete it

Deadline

Once you’ve outlined what the task is, you need to identify when the task needs to be completed by. This helps ensure that projects are completed in a timely fashion, with certain milestones achieved within a certain timeframe.

Context

You need to include other relevant details about a task, including how much time can be spent on it, which project it is for, and what priority level it should have. This provides the person responsible for the task more information as they organize their schedule.

Assume that you want to throw a surprise pizza party for your team, and so you wanted to give one trusted employee (Jacob) the responsibility of making sure the food was ordered ahead of time. The task you assign to Jacob might look like this:

“Order Food for Staff Surprise Party on Friday

Assigned to Jacob – Priority 3
*If unable to complete, please inform HR*

Wednesday:

• 3:15 – Get credit card from HR and call Pizzeria Planet. Place order for three large pizzas with peppers and onion and 75 of their house special chicken wings to be delivered Friday at 4:45.

Friday:

• 1:00 – Call Pizzeria Planet to confirm delivery”

That’s all there is to tasking out a process for your team to follow. There are also software solutions available to make this even easier for you and your team, so long as you keep these practices in mind and completely task out the things you assign to others. The clearer the process is, the more likely it is to be successful.

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