Forums

BLUF: Do I include a 10 remote people from another part of my company who will be working with my team for up to 6 months into my one-on-ones, team meeting, etc?  Note that my team is 15 direct reports in 4 locations already!  Some of these people are in a location with some of my directs.  Others are in a fifth location.

 

Here's my thoughts:

Staff meeting:  Invite them to the staff meeting.  I post agendas so they can decide to come or not.  My staff meetings have some management topics that they would not care about.  But we also talk about other things like quality initiatives, cross group sharing, etc.  I usually do the management updates first but I could do it last and let them leave if they don't care.  I do have agendas with times but I think it would be more disruptive to have them join in mid meeting.

One-on-ones: Do one-on-ones for the 4 people who will be there for 4-6 months.  Don't do it for the the 6 I only have for about 2 months.  Call up everyone to say hello and explain what I'm doing and why.  The thought of doing 19 one-on-ones is daunting.  BUT my thought is that I'd do it with one temp so I shouldn't let the number change my mind.

Details:  Very suddenly I have 10 people from another group in the company who are going to be joining my team.  6 of them for 2 months.  The other 4 for 4-6 months.  We do scrum and they are already in the daily stand-ups.  None of them are in my physical location.  My team is interacting well with them in the stand-ups.  The scrum masters say it's working out.

The reason this happened is that we have a rush project that is needed by the group that is supplying the help.  With the slow economy the management above me decided to shift them to me temporarily to get a new product out more quickly AND keep from having to lay them off because they had no work for them.  Note that this was brought up a few days before I went on vacation for 10 days and I came back to them working on my teams.  But the scrum masters and the team are handling it all very well.

tlhausmann's picture
Licensee BadgeTraining Badge

Mssunshine,

My (successful) experience in supervising a temporary workforce was to have This Week / Next Week group status meetings. Essentially two parts to the agenda: (1) What have we accomplished this week and (2) What we intend to accomplish next week.  The temporary work force of 5-7 individuals was on duty about 3-4 months during summers.  Project schedules and tasks were laid out before the summer started.

I applied this method for nearly 10 years and it worked very well.