What Can Harm Your Team’s Productivity?
The success of most companies depends on teams. Individual success is not so important as the overall team productivity. Strong teams of professionals drive amazing results. Since we have already discussed individual productivity well, let’s dive deeper into the know-how of increasing team efficiency.
So, how to be productive at work?
Problems With Time Management
Time management issues are usually the main reason for not reaching maximum productivity. You might hesitate on whether time management is your problem, not others. Still, it’s true! Once someone misses deadlines, the whole teamwork suffers from delays. So, you can make your team more productive by assisting your colleagues. And if you are a team leader, this is even one of your most important responsibilities!
How to help colleagues solve possible time management issues?
- Discover the cause for missed deadlines. If they have too long and complex to-do lists, help them prioritise tasks.
- Break complex projects into small tasks.
- Set realistic deadlines and don’t try to do a 1-month job in a week.
- Invite your teammates only to crucial meetings, as they take lots of time!
- Inspire your team members to have a healthy work-life balance. Remind them about breaks and wish a good evening in the end of the day.
Lack of Emotional Control
Relationships are what keeps teams together. No matter how professional all of the team members are, this expertise means nothing if people can’t cooperate. People working in an unhealthy environment can’t ever be successful. They hardly know how to be productive at work in such conditions.
So, what to do to make your environment productive and motivating?
- Keep track of your own emotional intelligence (EI) and tell others about it. EI includes two things concerning yourself — self-awareness and self-management, as well as two crucial social aspects — social awareness with relationship management.
- Take into account strengths and weaknesses of your teammates while distributing tasks. For example, ask who wants to handle a task that requires diverse expertise.
- If you see that someone is experiencing troubles, offer your help. Don’t leave your colleague alone with it.
Lack of Motivation
The best scenario is a team working on its intrinsic motivation whilst be strengthened by the extrinsic motivation. Once there is a problem with one of this components, team’s productivity can decrease or even fall.
So, how to be productive at work and keep your colleagues highly motivated all the time?
- Motivate your teammates by thanking them for a good job, if they have done so.
- Remind them about the company goals, mission and vision. Update them on the latest achievements and success.
- Conduct common activities to get to know each other better. These can be online activities for the period of the global pandemic. Games, quizzes, video chats — all works well.
Lack of Transparency
Proper transparency in communication is key for creating a healthy professional environment. Unless your teammates see clear business processes and company goals, they just do something for the sake of doing something. Collaborate and openly communicate important milestones. Everyone should be aware of what is going on.
How to increase transparency?
- Dedicate time for onboarding every new team member. Tell them about your company’s history, basics of doing business (of course, you won’t need to disclose confidential information, still newbies have to know what the company is doing, in what areas it is developing, what’s its global mission, vision and goals.
- Keep employees updated on all the recent changes affecting their work. It would be a pity if someone found out that their tasks are outdated and they worked in vain.
- Collaborate with all team members on a daily basis. Each of them should feel a valuable part of the team. This will help solve issues faster, as there will be a clear hierarchy with everyone having their own place in it. Collaboration is the answer to the question: “How to be productive at work?”
Micromanagement Issues
If you are a team leader, don’t try to control every step of your team members. This will only waste your time and drive an unhealthy over-controlled environment. Keep in mind that the basic leader’s role is to support and coordinate, not interfere with the tuned workflow. Micromanagement usually only harms.
How to get rid of possible micromanagement issues?
- Trust your colleagues, otherwise, why did you hire them? If you notice that their professional level doesn’t allow them to perform complex tasks, help teammates yourself or hire senior experts from the very beginning.
Provide your teammates with clear tasks, as well as necessary tools and resources for fulfilling them. - Keep track of success in one place. This may be a specialised software (for example, Jira by Atlassian) or a cloud spreadsheet in any office suite app.
- Give colleagues the freedom to choose how to do their work yet identify the guidelines, if necessary. Allow them to make decisions, and you’ll see the increase in productivity and creativity.
These are the top five things harming teams’ productivity. Sure, they are not the only ones in the corporate environment. They may be strengthened by poor working conditions, rigid leadership, weak goals, outdated technology. So, if you see the decrease in the team’s efficiency, analyse the causes for that. There is a high probability you’ll find its origins in one of five mentioned-above points.
Next, you know what to do. Grab our tips on how to be productive at work and start fixing the situation. Grand results are coming soon!.. ;)
