How to Create “Focus Rooms” for Your Team

I worked with each of my team members to ensure that they could answer this question if asked by family, friends, and acquaintances. I had each employee record their voice mails with something like, “Hello, this is Sue Smith. I am a team member in our relationship manager division, where we strive to deliver exceptional client experiences and ensure our clients are taken care of in a timely and effective manner.” This reinforces their role for them and our clients.

At worst, multi-tasker is a dirty band-aid used to triage a festering wound of mistakes that go unobserved until it causes sepsis and has to be amputated. But we love taking one person’s job and delegating it to two or three people to fix an organizational problem.

Financial advisors are the Olympians of throwing human capital at efficiency problems. If this was a competitive event, we would win gold! Move over attorneys and healthcare workers – we don’t train for a second-place around here.

Do you need more employees, or do you need to listen, educate and empower your existing ones?

I am 100% guilty. One of my regular comments to new hires about the work they will do for my RIA is, “You will need to be able to prioritize efficiently. Oh, and everything we do is a priority.”

What a recipe for disaster! Prioritization is a skill set that must be mastered. But we sabotage our own teams because we fail to teach them how best to prioritize, time block, and focus.

One of my responsibilities is to keep driving my team to be innovative, collaborative, and hyper-disciplined about their work. I caution everyone that I do not want to be a micro-manager but to never forget I can be if they begin to fail in their position. I can conflate micro-manager with drill sergeant. It is not a pretty sight; I never looked good in green fatigues. Nobody wants to see that.

When a team member feels overwhelmed, it is my responsibility to help them problem solve to deliver massive value and be their best selves.

As a financial advisor, I love to problem solve. It’s one of my superpowers. I may not have all the answers, but when a team member comes forward and wants to problem solve together, I know that in that shared experience, we can get creative and come up with solutions to help them achieve better results.

I have listened to other advisors talk about the challenges they had getting their team members to accomplish tasks according to what they felt was an appropriate timeline. I believe advisors have to be vulnerable and open to solutions. I always assume positive intent and try to identify ways to grow in our professional and personal lives. Some advisory firms run at an enterprise level like our RIA, which has five advisors, and others just hired their first team member.

I have a rule that, if ever violated, will lead you to experience the wrath of our firm’s leadership – you can only speak from a place of experience. If you do not have real-life experience and expertise in an area, you can’t provide advice on the subject.

Here are some of the questions that I ask advisors who struggle with team delegation and efficiency:

• Do you have a system to track tasks assigned?
• Is your team time blocking their schedules?
• When do you regularly follow up with your team about tasks assigned (Power tip: this meeting should be 10-15 minutes tops and cover all outstanding tasks)?
• Do you have time blocked on your calendar when the team members know they can reach you and ask questions?

• Do you assign deadlines to your team members for when tasks need to be accomplished?
• What steps are you taking to educate and empower your team in their professional development?
• What space do you give your team to focus on the work that needs to be done?

Focus, focus, focus

Modular furniture has become the rage in office design, at least before the world shifted to working from home during the pandemic.

My team appreciates working from home but loves the synergy of working together in a shared space. During our surges (when we schedule client meetings), nearly 15 of us occupy our 3,000 square-foot office to see nearly 500 households over a 4-6 week period. The energy pulsates through the space! It’s unreal.

Post-surge, our team members strategize about “time suckers” – where were they getting the most bogged down in their work.

Both our relationship management (RM) and operations team members have shared that they struggled with focusing on certain tasks when they were time blocking. For example, if the RM team had to schedule appointments and call hundreds of households, they were being interrupted by the door, incoming phone calls, IMs, and other small distractions that eat away at productivity.

The operations team, which is responsible for the movement of money and paperwork, shared that feeling. When they had to handle distribution requests or needed to do a third-party transfer for a client, they were interrupted by emails, messages, and people knocking on the door.

Our team members needed quiet places to perform focused or individual work for a few hours a day.

We created a focus room designed solely for our team members and created a few ground rules for how to use it.

The focus room is designed with minimal distractions, using the following elements:

• Glass door.
• Empty desk.
• Ultra-quiet treadmill under the desk.
• Phone.
• Wall with team members’ sneakers neatly kept.

Our goal was to create a minimalist space that allows the team member to focus on one task at a time.

The door is see-through because no one is allowed to camp out in the room and hide or work out.

Everyone in our office has laptops instead of desktops. If they are using the room, they are to bring their laptop into the room, but all tabs irrelevant to the task at hand must be closed.

Team members schedule a time to use the focus room, so there is no overlapping.

The phone is bypassed from receiving incoming phone calls; it can only make outgoing calls.

The room is not for client appointments. We have a separate office space for that.

The treadmill

A treadmill, yes, a treadmill.

Hear me out.

The treadmill isn’t there as some weight-loss device, though I don’t see a downside if that is a byproduct. It is there to encourage active and creative problem-solving that is only achieved when our bodies are in motion.

You can review Peter M. Vishton, Ph.D., William & Mary’s research on the two-string method through The Greatest Courses. It’s amazing – and reinforces how our brains, like computers, need the entire body engaged to be at our best creativity levels. This is another example of how advisors are constantly learning, even if it doesn’t involve money, and helping our teams become more empowered through that knowledge.

The under-desk treadmill was $1,900 and it is super important that it is ultra-quiet so the team can be on a phone call and the parties on the line never hear the engine operating or the team member treading.

When my team is engaged and talking with our clients, I want each experience to deliver massive value. I can’t think of a better way to ensure that happens than giving them the tools that help them do this. Do they have to use the treadmill or focus room? No, of course not. Do they want to? Yes, they really do.

When I asked my team about the room’s design, they loved it! They got excited and felt that even moving a few feet away from their desks into a separate space was enough for them to implement better time-blocking skills. As a boss, I am intentional about ensuring that my team is involved in planning the work they do. I do not “rule by committee,” but I do want input and collaboration from the people I trust and respect to ensure our clients are being serviced.

As a bonus, I gave each team member a chance to pick out a set of new sneakers only for use in the focus room. A small investment and a huge return! Who doesn’t like new shoes?

An organized boss wants clean, new sneakers on their office wall instead of old ones. :) Win-win.

Jamie Shilanski is a Registered Financial Consultant® for Shilanski & Associates. As an RFC® she helps clients understand the various options and nuances of financial services so they can make informed decisions. In this discipline, she customizes a financial plan that fits their clients a unique set of circumstances.

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