Six Ways to Increase Your Team’s Focus and Productivity Today

5 min readSep 18, 2015

By the Large team

1. Be Flexible

Is it totally necessary for your team to be in the office on a 9–5 schedule? Try experimenting with remote work and flexible hours. You might find that your team finds its flow with a more staggered schedule.

As long as everyone is on the same page in terms of the measurement of success, flexibility might make it easier to achieve success.

Things to try:

Set a day every other week for the whole team to work remotely
Set a no-meeting day once a week
Try a more relaxed policy for a set amount of time (six weeks, say)

2. Use Slack

Slack is the most powerful team productivity tool since email. It just is.

There are competitor products to Slack, but they all fall short in terms of integrations, mobile apps, ease-of-use, and design.

It’s the best way to keep your team in tight communication, and the integrations make it easy to schedule meetings, celebrate sales deals, prioritize work, collaborate on documents, share funny GIFs, or do just about anything else. Here’s a good post about how powerful Slack really is.

Things to try:

Use eat.ai to order lunch directly from Slack
Learn the keyboard shortcuts to move faster in Slack (press ⌘+? to see them all)
Use Large to buy, order, or book anything for your team directly in Slack

3. Try some ‘do-what-you-want’ time

Have you used GMail this week? How about a Post-It note? Did you know that both of these products began as internal side projects?

At Google, you’re only supposed to do your job 80% of the time. At 3M, it’s 85%. The rest of the time, dubbed 20% time at Google, is to be spent doing what you please.

This is how the Post-It note, GMail, Google Talk, and dozens of other fantastic products have been born — as well as lots of projects that may not have reached millions of users like Gmail, but may have optimized a process within a company.

The best part of this is that while new products for your business might be a byproduct, it’s also an awesome employee benefit that can improve happiness and productivity all-around.

Things to try:

A company hackathon
Monthly do-what-you-want day

4. Focus on the important stuff

Your team has plenty to work on — but they also spend plenty of time on things they shouldn’t need to.

One great way to outsource is with Large. It lives right in your Slack channels, and can buy, order, or book anything for your instantly.

Here are a few examples of what Large can do for you:

Have upcoming travel? Let Large take care of flights and hotels.
Need new company swag? Large can design and print awesome, super-soft shirts.
Is your office messy? Let Large coordinate weekly cleaning.
Want to celebrate something with the team? Large is great at organizing happy hours and BBQs.
Been sitting down too much? Large will have a standup desk delivered and assembled by the end of the week.

All you have to do is mention @large in Slack, and you’ll be connected with a human who can help. (Sign up today and use promo code MEDIUM25 for $25 off your first order)

5. Celebrate wins

A team that celebrates together will always strive for more reasons to celebrate.

Call out teammates for big and small accomplishments, get together to talk about the latest advances, and share out your successes with the rest of the company.

Things to try:

Send an email to the whole team celebrating someone’s accomplishment
Create bulletin board or Slack channel to post big and small wins

6. Support creative, cognitive and physical well-being

It’s really important that a team grows together. Setting aside time or budget and encouraging your team to grow creatively, cognitively, and physically is really important.

This means supporting things like yoga, mediation, and fitness. It also means supporting education and creative exploration. These things can happen as a team, or outside of work.

You might create a policy to help pay for a gym or yoga classes, or to pay for a number of books each month. You might simply encourage these things without allocating money to them.

Things to try:

Have a meditation instructor come to the office occasionally
Organize a team book club or book swap
Help pay for gym memberships

7. Trim your meetings

Meetings can be incredibly valuable, but they can also just slow everybody down. You can increase productivity vastly by creating a culture where meetings are deliberate in purpose, attendees, and time.

This can be done through policy changes, leading by example, or simply communicating ideas to the team.

Things to try:

Make default meeting lengths 20 minutes instead of 30. If you have 30 minutes set aside, you’ll tend to fill it — but you may be able to finish up in 20.
Plan every meeting with a deliberate group of people and specific expected outcomes