“Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
No matter how productive and effective your team is, there are always ways for you to help them become even better. Being dictatorial and demanding work from your team won’t help as you would not have built a relationship with them. You have to manage not just your personal but collective workload of your teams too. Helping your team manage its time well is a critical factor for its success. High productivity from your team necessitates that you be there to provide support, guidance and feedback whenever required. There are some quick things you can implement right away to improve your team’s productivity. Let’s take a look at some of the top tips for boosting team productivity:
- Set clear goals: Having clear goals from the start allows you to work on them from day one instead of having to figure things out as you go along. Ensure that your employees know what they have to do and never leave it open to interpretation. For this, define key goals and take into consideration your team’s capacity to execute on them and track progress.
- Encourage clear communication: The very first thing you should do if you wish to help your team become more productive is to be certain that you can all communicate with one another. Make use of a platform that lets you communicate with and update your team instantly on a regular basis.
- Avoid unnecessary team meetings: Some meetings are pointlessly long, don’t require everyone’s presence and lack a goal. Provide everyone with an agenda in advance, and ask them to prepare a 30-second to minute long update on their projects. Sum up every meeting with clear resolutions. As a consequence, the number of excessive meetings will gradually decrease. Go for team huddles whenever necessary.
- Give and receive feedback: Develop a culture of trust in your team, providing constructive, meaningful feedback on a regular basis. This exercise can help individuals within a team get a better understanding of what they’re working on and can really motivate them to work harder and be more productive.
- Reward their efforts: When someone from your team achieves a goal you had set or delivers something before a deadline, you should reward their efforts and make them feel appreciated. There’s no better way to encourage productivity in your team than to acknowledge the hard work they’ve put in.
- Reserve downtime: If your organization has a hard driving, 24/7 work culture, you should also consider mandating breaks for your team. Also, clearly communicate when you want a task to be completed. This way their downtime will not be disturbed.
- Eliminate excess: When employees have small, tedious tasks to take care of, they don’t spend enough time or thought on the more important tasks. Try not to give them a lot of small tasks that aren’t really necessary and give them time to focus on the important tasks.
- Provide training: Providing unrivalled training for your employees equips them with the tools to tackle each task to the best of their ability, for the benefit of your company. Striving to have continuous training in place within the culture of your company shows that you are investing in employees’ skills and future development.
