5 Tips For Taking Your Team Productivity to the Next Level

Growth is essential for the success of any business, and to achieve it you’ll need a productive workforce. Managing a team can be challenging, especially if yours is made up of people with different work styles. In order to succeed, you’ll need to get everyone on the same page and using good work habits.

Productivity has many facets, including strong communication, delegating tasks, and more. While juggling the aspects of a productive team may seem difficult, many of them are actually fairly easy to introduce to your workforce. Some of them can even be enjoyable, and liven up your office.

In this article, we’ll look at what it means to be productive, and explore five tips for increasing your team’s productivity. We’ll also examine some benefits of implementing these tips for the long-term growth of your business. Let’s get started!

What It Means to Be Productive

Generally speaking, productivity is defined as how efficient your team is at producing whatever output your business provides. This could be measured by the time it takes your team to create or market products, process and ship orders, and keep sales records.

Alternatively, if you’re providing a service, you might take into account how many clients you’re able to manage at a time and how long it takes to meet their needs.

When it comes to productivity, the overarching goal is to complete projects quickly and accurately so you don’t have to go back and fix mistakes. Growth in your productivity levels will be evident if your overall output is increasing. An increase in output means greater potential profits, which is why productivity should be a priority for your business.

5 Tips For Increasing Your Team’s Productivity

There are several ways to work on building a more productive team. Balancing the needs and desires of several people at once can be tricky, but you should strive to impress on your team how these productivity-boosting methods are beneficial for everyone. Let’s begin these tips discussing your team itself!

1. Know Your Team Members

Getting to know your team members has several advantages, including a better understanding of how they can best help your business succeed. It’s possible your team members has hidden talents that are currently being underutilized.

Learning about your team members’ lives outside of the office can help you understand the factors that impact their work. Being able to address these problems in a personalized manner will help your team feel like you care about their well-being, which in turn helps them feel more invested in your business.

Hosting events like ‘happy hours’ can provide opportunities for you to get to know your team members. However, even simple workplace conversations can be a source of insight. Overall, open communication will make your team more comfortable coming to you with problems that you can quickly address, so you can focus on getting more work done.

2. Delegate Tasks Based on Individual Skills

Having team members specialize in some aspects of your business will help them to become skilled at the related tasks, and accomplish them faster.

This is one area where knowing your team members is important. If you already know where each person’s skills lie, you can delegate tasks to them and be confident that they will be able to complete quickly and accurately.

Additionally, having specialization will prevent your team members from ‘stepping on each other’s toes’, or having unbalanced resources throughout the different areas of your business. Clearly designated specialties help to keep all of your bases covered.

3. Practice Strong Communication

Simply put, nothing gets accomplished without communication. If your team doesn’t have clear guidance, you’ll probably spend a lot of time correcting mistakes. As such, the more time you spend redoing tasks, the less time you spend on reaching your business’ goals.

In addition, make sure to communicate your goals when assigning tasks. Employees will usually complete tasks to a better standard if they know how they fit into the bigger picture. In other words, offering insight into what you’re trying to accomplish is valuable for everyone.

The simplest way to impart this is to consider installing a bulletin board or whiteboard in your office. This could feature some of the overall goals of your business permanently, as a constant reminder of what the end result is.

4. Give Your Team Freedom to Personalize How They Complete Work

You might think that in order for your team to be productive, you need to be constantly looking over their collective shoulder to ensure they’re staying on task. However, studies actually show the opposite is true.

Having trust in your workforce, and giving them freedom to tackle their work tends to make them happier, more productive, and deliver higher quality. Providing control to your team over how they complete their work will let them accomplish tasks in a way that suits them, and will likely complements their work style.

The chance to ‘freely think’ at work could also help you discover new ways of completing tasks that can trickle down throughout the whole business. This is obviously going to increase everyone’s productivity level, including your own.

5. Make Use of Technology to Greater Streamline Productivity

There are a lot of tools available to help you save time during you day-to-day work. Of course, it goes without saying that implementing relevant technology will help you and your team complete work faster.

For example, scheduling calendars are a popular gateway into this. However, project organization tools for brainstorming and collaborating will also be useful for businesses needing creative ideas on a regular basis.

In fact, even invoicing a robust and powerful invoicing app such as Hiveage could help you and your team spend less time administering and discussing the tasks in hand, and more time actually completing them.

Conclusion

Having a team means counting on other people to make your business grow and flourish. Helping your team to be productive in as many ways as possible can set your business up for success, and ultimately benefits your team members as well.

In this article, we’ve given you five tips for increasing your team’s productivity. Let’s recap them quickly:

1. Know your team members.
2. Delegate tasks.
3. Practice strong communication.
4. Give your team freedom.
5. Make use of technology.

Are you looking to improve productivity, and how will these tips help? Let us know in the comments section below!