Improve Team Performance

“Science may never come up with a better office communication system than the coffee break.” — Earl Wilson

Do you think your project team has room for improvement 📈? Do you want to know how to improve performance 💪, quality 🥇and motivation🤘? Then read on!

The Technique

In my many years of experience as an agile coach at dreimannzelt.com I noticed that I was using one single improvement technique over and over again. This technique has almost always been the one with the biggest impact on our clients.

Improve communication! 📢

Communication in a team or company is like the nervous system in your body. If it’s not fully working, everything else quickly goes down the drain.

Believe it or not, for the above advice customers continue to pay me six-figure sums! But can it that easy? Unfortunately not. Although we know that an improvement in communication leads to vastly improved team performance, the crux is how to improve communication.

How

A large treasure of experience is what helps an agile coach like me here. The specific methods I have to introduce in order to improve communication are different for every team. Even if I gave you a list of all techniques I ever used successfully, that wouldn’t help you much. You’d still need to figure out which one is appropriate and how to adapt it. But there are a few things I saw yielding improvements in almost any case. And I want to share them with you.

A Bag of Tricks

Allow slack time ⛱

Give your team room to breathe and allow them to have some down time during work. Walking over to a colleague to chat or hanging around in the kitchen and chatting over coffee are good signs! Don’t try to squeeze out more “efficiency” by sanctioning such slack time — quite on the contrary: encourage your team to take these time-outs.

Raise the noise level 🔈

Is it very noisy with a lot of people talking in your office? If yes, then that’s a good sign! A quiet office is most often an indicator of bad performance and sometimes even hostility or deeper problems of the organization. So encourage your team to discuss loudly. Granted sometimes you need a quiet work environment — simply reserve a room as a retreat for quiet work.

Do retrospectives 🔙

Challenge your team to openly talk about problems (and tackle them) regularly! Scrum has the even of a retrospective, which happens after each sprint. But even if you don’t follow Scrum, you should have regular kaizen or process improvement sessions. Make sure to keep a constructive culture of improvement and courage instead of blaming and fear.

Talk at least once every day 👆

Have a fixed location and point in time every day for your team to talk. Even if they’re busy in quiet work all day, they should talk for at least 10 minutes! Even if these events only end up being “hey, we got nothing to talk about”, they have value. The present an opportunity and a challenge to communicate. Scrum calls these events “daily scrum” and limits them to max 15 minutes.

Change location 🏞

Who said that work can only happen at an office? For most teams I’ve seen across various industries, their work does not always demand them to be at their desk or in an office. Encourage teams to take a walk or work in the park for a few hours. Oxygen, movement and the change of location spark creativity and foster communication. Break through the mold and don’t limit work to the four walls of your office.

Closing Words

You learned the most efficient technique to improve your team’s performance: communication. The tricky part, of course, is the how. Although this is different for each team and takes an experienced coach to figure out, I could give you a few general tricks that almost always work:

• Allow slack time
• Raise the noise level
• Do retrospectives
• Talk at least once every day
• Change location

Try some of these and let me know about the results you see!

Matthias Orgler is an experienced agile coach at dreimannzelt.com. He helps teams and projects to improve — and make work a little more fun 😄.