Brilliant football tricks to use at work!

It’s almost the end of the English football season (soccer for my US readers). My team. Ipswich Town, have 2 games to play to see if we’ll be promoted to the Premier League. It’s a tense but exciting time to be a Tractor Boy!

But having lived through the ups and downs of the Championship League the last few months, I realised (as I often do), that there are several brilliant football tricks that make things more interesting, and these could, and do work really well in the workplace.

So if you’re in HR or managing a team and looking for new ideas to overcome the burnout, mental health issues and productivity problems currently gripping our workplaces – here are the secrets from the world of football.

1. Make it a Season

The football season runs from autumn to spring, with breaks for Christmas and then for summer. So there’s a break. We kind of do it with work, but it’s not really defined. Our working year can be one long grind, so why don’t we divide it up?

This might depend on your industry. For example in retail you could have the Christmas Season and the Summer season. Then quieter times in between. This could be that people work full hours in those busy seasons, and then bank their hours up to take during quieter times, or that you have reduced hours during the quieter times.

If you don’t like football, then think of it like school or university terms. Could you have work terms where people know there’s a focus for the next 3 months, then there’s a month where they can take leave, work flexibly or do reduced hours.

In France they definitely have seasons of work. In July and August, everything shuts down. Then from September to November the whole country seems to go into a frenzy. There’s roadworks everywhere, buildings are being built, work happens! Then another break for Christmas and winter. Then another frenzy of work from April to June.

It really seems to focus the men in orange (that’s what workers in orange vests are called in France) on getting a project done.

So could you do something similar with your workplace?

2. Have players on loan

One of my favourite Ipswich players this season has been 20 year old Omari Hutchinson. He’s on loan from Chelsea for the season. He has scored some brilliant goals, and when he scores, all Ipwich fans sing (to the tune by Whitney Houston) ‘Ooooh I wanna dance with Omari, I wanna feel the heat with Omari… with Omari from Chelsea’.

Anyway I digress. My point was that many teams use players on loan. It benefits everyone. The club loaning the player might not have space to try them out, but knows they have potential. So they lend them, the player builds their skill, then returns a better player. The team that gets the player gets a player that might be a higher level than they normally would have.

We do use this concept a little bit in the workplace, with secondments and project teams. But I’m not sure we do it enough, or specifically for skill development or retention. Younger employees want to progress their career, however if there’s no progression at the moment in your team, could HR or managers find opportunities elsewhere in the company for a set period, to develop the person for the future?

3. Managers and Coaches

I’ve currently been updating my first book ‘Management Bites’ (new edition due out very soon, I promise!) and I think we are going to have to rethink managers in the future. I have a chapter about the new challenges in the book, but I think we need to look outside of work for inspiration. And football might have the answer. You see organisations are still promoting technical experts into people management roles. And when someone isn’t that good with people, it doesn’t make for a productive or engaged team (unless you use some of the processes in Management Bites!). However in football they have a manager and then a coach.

The manager sets the strategy for each game, and puts the right players in the right roles. The coach then trains and develops the players skills. Could we do the same in teams? The manager sets the goals and the roles, but there is an official ‘coach’ that spends time with each person in the team on their skill development? Reviewing training the person has done. Discussing how things have been dealt with. Sharing tools and techniques for the person to try and then seeing what works?

Football has some great aspects to it that could translate into making work teams and work in general more productive. So why not try these out?

Angela Atkins is the co-founder of Elephant Group which now runs training around the world. She is also the bestselling author of the Bites book series, and this year will see her first novel published. For more about her writing visit Angela-Atkins.com