The number of tips and tricks to boost your team’s productivity is constantly rising. The problem is that much of these tips focus on short-term performance, and they damage the efficiency in the long run. Instead of focusing on team’s well-being and prosperity, teams are putting too much pressure to complete the ever-growing to-do list which can result in long working hours, stress, and eventually, burnout.
Luckily, there are a number of sustainable solutions that you can implement to achieve team productivity.
Make Work Meaningful
People are satisfied when they work on something that’s important to them and towards something they feel invested in. There is a direct connection between discovering meaning in work and high productivity.
Start by finding out what motivates your team
Create a survey to find out your employees’ satisfaction, asking the question: “What would cause you to take another job with a different company tomorrow?”
Provide regular one-to-one feedback sessions with your team members. These feedback sessions shouldn’t just be a one-way talk on how the team member is performing, but a chance to see how they are enjoying their role, talk about their future goals and plan how they aim to achieve them.
Implement importance through professional development
Help your team members find meaning in their work by providing them with self-reflection. Ask them questions like: What are you working for? What impact do you want to create in your job?
This can help employees feel that they are trusted and respected, and increase the level of commitment and productivity. Once you’ve identified what impact they would like to make and how you can start by providing them with more investment in their work and create professional development plans so they can achieve that impact.
Ensure Focused Workloads
Prevent your team members from trying to handle too many tasks at once. Studies have shown that switching to a new task while in a middle of another increases the time it takes for both tasks to be finished.
Streamline tasks with project sprints and retrospectives
Sprints can empower all kinds of teams to work in a more focused way. Setting key points with your team is going to ensure that your work is focused and eliminate the chance of bouncing between unrelated tasks. Employees can streamline their tasks over each sprint when moving tasks through to completion. The team can glance back at what has been accomplished during that sprint, in order to improve the work productivity.
Establish healthy working guidelines
In this era of constant Slack notifications, emails on phones, and working across time zones, having a defined working cut-off hours from 9-5 isn’t so easy to implement. Individuals who are unable to detach from work during their downtime experienced more exhaustion compared to the ones who are able to distance themselves from highly demanding work. It is proven that these people can recover from stress more easily, which leads to higher productivity levels.
In order to establish a healthy working environment in which team members should feel free to distance themselves from work in their downtime, you ought to establish some guidelines for when employees are not expected to read and respond to messages, such as 6pm-9am. You can also encourage team members to set up a do-not-disturb period for notifications.
Support the Work-Life Balance of your team members
In order to increase your employee’s productivity, you should make sure that their time at work supports their well-being.
Provide flexible working hours
Support your team well-being by offering adaptable working options. Your employees would like the possibility to work from home from time to time. This practice should be encouraged because it boosts the team productivity. Workers who were allowed to work flexibly achieved more and were much happier in their work.
There are a number of tools that can help you enable effective remote working: Slack, Uberconference, GitHub, Dropbox, and Harvest or Time Doctor.
Encourage well-being activities at work
Between everyday responsibilities, it is very hard for people to find the time for activities that are useful to their physical and emotional wellbeing. For that matter, some companies are providing the opportunity to support well-being inside the work environment, and there are seeing extraordinary outcomes and productivity.
So regardless of whether you are more inspired by mindfulness sessions or you think that your team would appreciate an additional physical activity, try to get an expert to your office to convey a weekly wellbeing program. You could also offer each team member an individual well-being budget or an extracurricular course of their choice.
There are a lot of great ideas on how to improve your team’s productivity. Keep in mind that every team is different, so the best practice is to discuss these issue and come up with a solution that you feel comfortable using and will lead to great results. The best solution, however, is to be strategic, not obsessive with your to-do list.
productivity, team, work, workflow2017-10-19 | Guide | No Comments
