What to Prioritize in Your First Month as an Operations Manager

So, you recently landed a new job as an Operations Manager? Congratulations!  

Although exciting there is a lot of anxiety that can come with new challenges, we get it. Starting fresh can feel nerve-wracking and imposter syndrome often creeps up on us.  

We’re here to offer you a roadmap into how you’ll want to navigate your first 30 days as an Operations Manager. Let’s jump in. 

The Job Description

An Operations Manager is a dynamic role in which you’ll be responsible for a wide variety of tasks.  

Strategic planning will be a key part of the job, helping teams prioritize tasks and assessing the success of the company’s operations. 

You’ll also be expected to improve organization processes, like workflows and policies for maximum time and cost efficiency. You need to know the ins and outs of the company to understand how tasks are done and find ways to improve them. 

Lastly, the role often includes a lot of collaboration with HR when it comes to leave tracking, documentation, onboarding, scheduling, training, and new software implementation.

The Priorities

Understand the Company 

You can’t hop right into operational efficiencies without getting the basics down. Take ample time to read about the company’s mission, comprehend their structure, and comb through their key workflows. Review the company’s policies and documentation to see if everything is well recorded and if communication can be improved. 

As an Operations Manager, it’s also essential to identify important stakeholders at the company who can best explain to you how their department operates, what’s working, and what needs improvement. Take note of who you’d like to meet with and start introducing yourself! 

You should find some major gaps and opportunities already, just through these simple steps. 

Build Relationships  

Once you’ve scavenged through everything and written down your questions, it's time for some conversation. Meet with stakeholders, including department heads, HR, and key team players to understand their day-to-day, where they need support, and get clarity on all the notes you’ve taken.  

Get an overall pulse of the office. Assess how the team is feeling about internal and external processes, including how they feel benefits and paid time off are managed. If you can make the team happier and more motivated, you’ll have more enthusiasm for future ideas. 

Often, employees are ready to have a conversation about their frustrations at work. They’re usually open to sharing with their Operations Manager and invested in making things easier and more efficient, so these conversations tend to be quite productive.  

Assess Current Processes 

You had questions, now you have answers. Time to put all the pieces together.  

Start by conducting an operational audit to find bottlenecks and inefficiencies. You’ll want to identify key operational tasks or main company challenges, including scheduling, time off management, and project management, and see what gaps there are. 

From your conversations with stakeholders, see if you identify any overlaps. Did all managers complain about scheduling conflicts or issues with communication and coordination? This will help you see where you can make the biggest impact. 

Evaluate the company’s current tech stack. How are they handling things like:

• Project management 
• Customer relationships and support 
• Sales Leads 
• Human resources 
• Leave management 

Through this, you’ll be able to see if they’re using the right tools or if there are places they seriously need to automate. 

Identify Quick Wins 

We’re only walking you through your first month as an Operations Manager, so we don’t expect you to reinvent the wheel. Although, it would be nice to make a few changes to show your knowledge and confidence.  

Instead of a big overhaul, see if there are any quick optimizations to improve simple, day-to-day operations. Try boosting productivity by implementing a short training session to clarify ambiguous procedures or policies or address minor communication gaps with some easy guidelines. 

You can start to propose and initiate some changes, like transferring some of their paper processes to digital systems. While the process of inputting old data and logs into a system can be a longer-term project, you can begin to introduce these new systems immediately. For example, if your company doesn’t use a leave management system, an intuitive software like Vacation Tracker takes only 30 minutes to set up and can free up hours in your team's schedule each month.  

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All these quick fixes will help to improve synergy amongst your team, reduce delays, and optimize workflows for maximum productivity.  

Create a Roadmap of Priorities 

Now that you’ve already made an impact, it’s time to plan for bigger things! 

Based on all your findings, it’s time to define some goals and highlight how they align with business needs. You should categorize your ideas as urgent or long-term to outline which should be acted upon first and explore how you’ll balance these different needs. 

It’s essential to determine some KPIs to monitor operational success. You’ll want to be able to show up to future meetings with some great statistics about how your work improved productivity and reduced scheduling conflicts by x%. Don’t forget to take baseline statistics so your comparisons are as impressive as they should be. 

Build out a budget based on how much your plan will cost the company, including software, new hires, new tech, and projections on how much you think this will save the company in the long run. This is a great way for any Operations Manager to get buy-in, but make sure not to overpromise. Always stay realistic with your goals.

The Challenges

Keep costs low: One thing’s for sure, no matter where you are in the world, your economy is probably hurting. Businesses everywhere tend to be more frugal and reluctant to make big expenses, preparing for the impact of inflation and the increased cost of goods and fearful of uncertainty. While you need a budget to make an impact as an Operations Manager, you’ll also need to balance this with the business’s needs. 

Managing resistance to change: An idea that may sound revolutionary to you, may get pushback from others. It’s normal to not see eye to eye with others, or for them to be reluctant to change the way they’ve been doing things, most likely for years. Your objective is to explain why the changes are being made. Help teams understand the benefits of change, so it feels like a positive thing and not a bother. This helps to make the transition as easy as possible. 

Balancing efficiency with employee wellness: When your job is all about maximizing productivity, sometimes we mistake humans for machines. A relentless focus on efficiency without considering workload distribution and employee morale can lead to burnout, disengagement, and evidently, a high turnover rate. As an Operations Manager, you must find the right balance by making sure you’re giving your team the right resources to be more productive, without being overworked. This includes implementing smarter scheduling, tracking workloads, and most importantly, encouraging time off by making it feel easy and accessible to request PTO. 

Handling unpredictability: From supply chain disruptions to sudden staffing changes, expect the unexpected in your role as an operations manager. Always remember to build flexibility into your processes, so you can adapt to any situation rapidly. This might mean training extra employees as backups or using technology that gives you total visibility over company operations, so you can spot potential challenges before they happen. 

Want to REALLY Impress Your Boss?  

If you want to make a lasting impact as an Operations Manager, eliminating unnecessary admin work is a great place to start. Every hour your team spends manually tracking leave, chasing approvals, or updating spreadsheets is an hour that could be spent on more valuable work. Efficiency isn’t necessarily about doing things faster, it’s about doing them smarter. 

That’s where Vacation Tracker comes in. Instead of managing time-off requests through emails, paper forms, or messy spreadsheets, you get a centralized, automated leave management tool that does all the heavy lifting for you.  

Vacation Tracker saves your team hours each month by keeping leave requests, approvals, and schedules all in one place, plus easy integration with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Workspace makes it easy for your team to manage their leave, without new accounts, logins or systems to learn.

By improving leave management, you’re not just making life easier for your team and tackling what was most likely a long-term frustration, you’re demonstrating leadership, improving efficiency, and setting the foundation for long-term operational success. 

Want to prove you’re a problem-solver from day one? Start with smarter leave management. 

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