🎒 Microlesson

🪞 Reflect

What kind of structured frameworks does your distributed team use to make decisions, assess outcomes, and provide feedback? 

💡 Concept

Distributed teams often face challenges in maintaining consistency and cohesion due to the physical distance between coworkers and their diverse work environments. Developing and using rubrics can be a powerful strategy to enhance team outcomes. Here’s what rubrics do: 

1. 🛣️ Provide clear criteria and expectations for tasks or projects, which ensure that team members are aligned on goals and standards regardless of their locations. 

For example, here are criteria for a task to document the resolution to a customer’s problem:

2. ✅ Establish a common framework for evaluation, which enables distributed teams to maintain consistency in performance assessment and feedback while promoting fairness and transparency. 

3. 🗨️ Facilitate clearer communication among team members by providing a shared language for discussing strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. 

Check out the Hybrid Team Success Toolkit for a Performance Rubric Template you can use in your team.

4. 📃 Document decisions and feedback, which can help teams build a collective understanding of why and how decisions are made. 

Check out this Idea Confetti template (PDF) that uses a rubric to help make decisions about new business ideas. Click here if you have a Mural account and would like to create a Mural from this template.

🎬 Take Action

• Identify the purpose: Determine the purpose of the rubric, such as assessing a project, evaluating employee performance, or making decisions. 

• Define the criteria: Identify the key criteria that will be used to evaluate the person, project, or option. 

• Establish levels: Define different levels for each criterion, such as “does not meet expectations,” “approaching expectations,”and “meets expectations.”

• Develop descriptors: Write descriptors for each level. These descriptors should be clear, concise, and measurable. What does it look like when someone “meets expectations”? How do you know when something “does not meet expectations”?

• Organize the rubric: Structure the rubric in a logical format, such as in a table, with criteria listed vertically and levels of performance listed horizontally.

• Test the rubric: Pilot the rubric with a small sample of tasks or projects to ensure that it effectively assesses performance and provides meaningful feedback.

• Refine as needed: Gather feedback from stakeholders and make any necessary revisions to the rubric to improve clarity, accuracy, and effectiveness.

• Share the rubric: Once the rubric has been refined and validated, ensure that all relevant stakeholders are familiar with it and know how to use it effectively.

✅ Check In

🧠 Keep Learning

Learn more about measuring performance using rubrics in our Leadplaceless course. 

🎁 Learn with your team!

Refer our weekly microlessons to your team members to learn as a group! Just follow the instructions in the section below to get started.