What, then, can you do to optimize team productivity in the workplace? You know you're striving for both efficiency and effectiveness, but going about boosting results may still seem a troubling proposition.
With an embrace of technology and a refinement of your communication strategies, you can see measurable improvements within your company. That's the approach I take at Speedlancer, and the impact has been enormous.
I'll break down each productivity-boosting tactic below, one by one.
Without further ado:
Avoid communication breakdowns by increasing acknowledgement.
Communication breakdowns can be the death knell for productivity efforts in the workplace. It's frustrating to experience a drop in efficiency and effectiveness in your endeavors due to a breakdown in communications, but it is sometimes easy to focus on technical issues while ignoring the "simple" things.
Foster greater team productivity throughout your staff by promoting greater communication.
Take active measures by reiterating the crucial nature of communication during all team meetings. Institute a policy of increased acknowledgement, wherein all staff members are required to respond to emails and messages with some form of reply that acts at least as acknowledgement of receipt.
BUT. Make sure that people aren't just wasting time in their comms. Sending out dumb emails that nobody wants to read in order to look smart. That's just annoying.
Encourage team interaction.
This goes hand-in-hand in helping to avoid communication breakdowns. Your team should be a team, after all. You can't have a group of people truly work closely together unless they understand each other, both on a professional and personal level.
Towards this end, consider organizing frequent team bonding activities in an effort to bring your staff closer together.
Coffee breaks and birthday celebrations during working hours will actually pay dividends down the line, allowing your team to gel together and learn about one another, which in turn will increase long-term effectiveness and communication levels.
You can't measure the impact of sitting down over a coffee or a beer with your team. But it's still there. And it's awesome.
Target motivations.
Consider each of your team members individually. What drives them? Everyone works differently because we are all motivated differently.
Take the time to investigate the motivations of each of your team members, then capitalize on this knowledge by placing them in a position that caters to their motivations and best allows them to succeed. After all, the greater their successes, the greater your successes.
An example: Got a kid on your squad that loves to crunch numbers? Let the wunderkind work exclusively with market analysis. They'll love the challenge!
Embrace technology.
This is the 21st century. If you're not down with technology, you're surely on your way down soon.
With this in mind, encourage the embrace of technology within the workplace. Consider all alternatives, such as upgrading work phones to a more recent smartphone model, and ensuring that your workstations are advanced enough to competently and smoothly run the most recent operating system(s).
Also -- and this is important -- encourage team members to bring in and use their own devices, so long as you're not a firm that relies too greatly on high security.
After all, if team members are allowed to enjoy their own devices, it'll only make it more likely that they'll enjoy their work.
You can also look at giving your employees more resources, even through outsourcing, to make their jobs manageable instead of stressful. Technology will let you do that. If there's elements of their work that are difficult, let them delegate.
Implement "anywhere access."
As I said above, it's the 21st century, and technology's might has never been greater. Get on board by ensuring that your business offers "anywhere access" to all workplace-related information that your team members may conceivably be able to make use of.
Thanks to the proliferation of Wi-Fi Internet access and work productivity apps that provide for cloud computing/communications, your team can now work from virtually anywhere.
Let them. Allowing team members to access their work remotely using available online collaboration tools will empower them to work in instances where they otherwise wouldn't be able to. And it'll let them wake up in the morning and not dread being in an office.
Track as much as you can.
Embrace metrics wherever possible. Data is your friend. Analytics such as productivity per hour, total number of hours worked, specific hours worked on a day-to-day basis, and more can serve to inform your team productivity efforts and allow you to tweak your strategies as necessary.
If you don't have your own proprietary system in place to allow for the tracking of these metrics, you can use existing software to accomplish these ends.
Examples include SharePoint, task assignments through Outlook, or just a simple hour-logging spreadsheet you whip-up through Google Docs.
Don't micromanage though. Don't try and screen grab what your team are doing or monitor their time at their desks or any of that crap. They'll hate it and sooner or later they'll hate you. That's not good.
Revel in your wins.
Hey, don't be afraid to celebrate your victories. Building team cohesion and advancing productivity goes hand-in-hand with publicly acknowledging when things go right.
Praise and rewards for your successful, hard-working team members goes an incredibly long way towards building a positive office environment that will only lead to greater team productivity and greater successes down the line.
That said, learning from losses is equally as important. We're all fallible people.
Keep this in mind when someone on your team stumbles. In these instances, it's usually best to avoid any public admonishment, and instead work on more internal reflections on why something happened and what might be done to prevent the same misstep(s) in the future.
Reviewing mistakes and then creating an open, productive dialogue with your team member is the way to go. Through slowly eliminating the mechanisms that lead to such failures, your office can ultimately enjoy greater team productivity.
There you have it! If you implement the strategies detailed above, you're bound to find your workplace is happier, healthier, and more tuned towards productivity than ever. Good luck!