Lead the advisory team through operational planning and a team meeting

What is going on

A confidential grievance about uneven workload in the advisory team is being handled by people services, but the General Manager has recognised that the underlying issue is real: the team of eleven carries more retainers than it can serve well and the allocation has grown by habit rather than design. Client satisfaction is still high but reports have started to slip and after hours work is common. The General Manager wants an operational plan for the next two quarters, a properly run team meeting to agree how work will be allocated and reviewed, and a simple improvement cycle so the leadership team can see whether the change is working. The psychosocial hazard is recorded in the risk register.

Your brief

Analyse the team's workload and performance data, develop an operational plan with clear allocation rules and measures, plan and chair a team meeting that engages the team in the decisions, record the outcomes and set up a continuous improvement cycle with review points.

Work through it

You do not need to do it all. Doing a few of these will show you what the work is like. Your ticks and notes stay on this device.

• Using the client records in the Client Relationship Manager and the workload data supplied by your assessor, analyse the retainer allocation across the team and identify where the load is uneven and why.
• Draft the operational plan for the next two quarters: objectives, allocation rules, capacity limits, backup engagement leads, reporting standards, resources needed and measures.
• Plan the team meeting using the Meeting Agenda and Minutes Template, with an agenda designed to get honest input, decisions to be made and how you will handle disagreement.
• Describe how you will chair the meeting to build effective relationships, including how you will address the grievance without breaching confidentiality and how you will respond to resistance.
• Write the minutes of the meeting from the discussion notes supplied, with decisions and actions assigned to named people with dates.
• Update the psychosocial hazard RC-26-023 in the Risk and Compliance Register with the treatment from the plan and a review date, and update client records with any change of engagement lead.
• Design a continuous improvement cycle with three measures, a monthly review and a way for team members to raise problems, and describe how you will report progress to the General Manager.

What someone in this role would produce

• Workload analysis
• Operational plan
• Meeting agenda and chairing approach
• Meeting minutes with decisions and actions
• Updated register and client records and improvement cycle design