7 tips to improve your team's productivity

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Don't be afraid to sound incompetent, spend less time in meetings and get your office renovated.

1. Value ideas, not hierarchy

In one of his, Steve Jobs expressed the following thought:

If you want to hire great people and keep them working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions. And you should be guided by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas should win. Otherwise, outstanding minds will not stay with you.

Steve Jobs

Appreciate the ideas your employees have, regardless of their job title. If an employee provides you with a meaningful thought, listen to it, regardless of his position in the career ladder.

2. Set clear and understandable goals

Authors “Balanced Scorecard. From strategy to action.”Robert Kaplan and David Norton mentioned that only 7% of the employees they surveyed fully understand their company's business strategy and can say what they must do to achieve corporate goals.

And according to the Final Destination: Organizational Transparency ClearCompany study, 44% of office workers have little idea of what their company is striving for. If your employees don't understand what you want from them, what kind of productivity can we talk about at all?

You, as a leader, must clearly and clearly articulate the goals and objectives of your organization to your subordinates. It is important for employees to understand how completing their small individual tasks helps the company to make global plans a reality. If employees do something without understanding at all what they are doing and for what, their motivation and involvement will remain low.

3. Lead by example

David Carpenter, an entrepreneur and economist at the University of Iowa, states:

As a team leader, you must lead by example. It's easy to sit still, shouting orders and picking on employees. But a good leader must be ready to understand the problem and help employees find a solution, and not just demand results from them.

David Carpenter

Leading by example is a necessary quality for a true leader. By showing your employees how to work, you kill a few birds with one stone.

First, you motivate the team by setting the bar with your own hands - people see that if you cope, then the task is achievable. Secondly, you legitimize your role as a leader - no one will say behind your back that the boss is not doing anything useful. Third, this is how you train your employees, serving them not only as a manager, but also as a mentor.

4. Don't be afraid to sound incompetent

Patrick Lencioni, in his Five Vices of a Team, argues that a lack of trust is the main reason that attempts to create a successful team of professionals fail.

How to build trusting relationships with colleagues and subordinates? Lencioni says that this is possible only when the team members are not afraid to appear weak and vulnerable, to ask for help and support.

As a leader, you shouldn't put on a know-it-all mask. Be honest. If you don't understand something, admit it openly and ask for advice from a subordinate who is more knowledgeable than you.

This will show your colleagues that it is not embarrassing to ask for help. This will allow team members to build trust with each other. Plus, if your employees don't hesitate to ask more experienced colleagues for help, they can avoid many annoying mistakes.

5. Provide comfortable workplaces for the team

Isaac Oates, CEO and Founder of Justworks, believes that the biggest impact on team productivity is the workplace. In his opinion, 12 expert tips to make 2019 your most productive year yet, open-space offices are counterproductive.

The workplace is a very important thing. If in your office the only way for employees to get any focus is to put on noise-canceling headphones and play music, you can forget about creativity. The best ideas are born when a person is alone or in a small group. Provide your people with places where they can calmly reflect.

Isaac Oates

These words are confirmed by the research The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration by Harvard Business School specialists. They concluded that workers in open-space suffer more from stress and are more distracted, communicate less in person, and are generally distanced from colleagues. Naturally, this all negatively affects productivity.

Most likely, you will not be able to seat all your employees in separate offices, but there is an alternative option - to install cubicles or soundproof booths in the office. And if you are concerned about the physical form of colleagues, you can transfer them to standing jobs. According to Call Center Productivity Over 6 Months Following a Standing Desk Intervention research, this is good for productivity.

6. Spend less time in meetings

An Atlassian survey showed You waste a lot of time at work that the average office worker spends about 31 hours each month at various meetings, gatherings and brainstorming sessions. Probably, this time could be used with a little more benefit.

Business meetings are one of the biggest barriers to productive work. They constantly distract employees and knock them out of rhythm. But I don’t think it’s a good decision to give up meetings altogether, or come up with all sorts of cool rules like "no meetings on Wednesdays" or "limit meetings to 10 minutes." No, the organization needs to make the meetings effective and productive.

Charlene Lauby HR Consultant at HR Bartender

Save your employees' time. Only hold meetings if they have a clear purpose and agenda. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup incubator, has to choose meeting times that are comfortable for most employees and not very disruptive to their work.

Organize meetings either at the beginning or at the end of your work day - but not in the middle. Another option is to conduct discussions not live, but through instant messaging or video conferencing clients.

7. Paint the office

Maybe it will seem like a trifle. But research suggests that office wall color affects the productivity of your employees. University of Texas researcher Nancy Qualleck found Effects of nine monochromatic office interior colors on clerical tasks and worker mood that white walls are bad for people's ability to focus.

She put three groups of workers in rooms of different colors: red, white, and blue-green. Subjects from the white room made the most mistakes when completing tasks. Red and blue-green, on the other hand, seem to have helped employees be more effective.

Another Blue or Red study? Exploring the Effect of Color on Cognitive Task Performances - from the University of British Columbia - showed that people in rooms with a reddish tint are better at performing routine tasks that require attention to detail, while blue, on the contrary, stimulates creativity.

So keep that in mind when you're finally going to do some renovation in your office.