How to Increase Team Productivity

In today’s complex and collaborative work environment, increasing productivity on an individual basis as well as on a collective scale is a real challenge for organizations. Every organization requires a dynamic and motivated working environment for being productive to reap great results. How to Increase team productivity – it is a real challenge for top leaders of any team to constantly encourage the productivity of their employees. However, by making few positive changes within the working environment can bring about a tremendous impact and yield long lasting results.

Set Well Defined Goals

Setting up well defined long term and short term goals for your organization is critically important. You should step back and work out everything your team should be working on and the timelines associated with your goals. Analyzing the team’s capacity and how much time they would require for achieving them is an icing on the cake. This reality check in advance will help you decide also the allocation of resources and what tasks need to be allotted to whom within the team for smoothly executing them.

Encourage Communication

Open and honest communication in the workforce is always welcomed by team members. Honestly communicating with each other regarding work and it’s execution is a much better way of going forward instead of having a totally closed environment with no scope of any dialogue between the leader and team members. Allocating time and resources efficiently and discuss priorities to uncover the root of many issues.

A cohesive working and well developed communication skills encourage the germination of new ideas, sharing of best practices and having a great working relationship. Personal and professional development greatly benefits the organization. A positive, supportive and an open working environment also encourages team members to contribute new ideas without the fear of getting criticized.

Brainstorm with your Team

Exchanging ideas and adding new ones is essential for an organization’s growth. You should make a priority for your team to frequently exchange ideas and encourage new ones for achieving those goals and improving procedures. Once you decide which procedures are more than required and take too long, simplify them and set them up so that they are easier to follow. Brainstorming will also help you discover tens of processes and procedures which can be streamlined and even eliminated in specific circumstances. Erasing redundancy should be a top priority and intensively discussing with the team will further help in simplifying operations.

Training & Incentives

Giving your employees an opportunity to grow professionally and to enable themselves to be updated is extremely important. Honing further their skills and learn new challenging technology will ultimately make them more productive. As a business owner, developing their intellect by training them and allocating incentives for them will not only encourage them for working with more dedication, but also will serve as a catalyst for motivating themselves.

Plan your Meetings Efficiently

Meetings should be one of the most productive time slots during working hours. They are excellent sources of sharing information, creating new plans and to make rock solid decisions. However utmost care should be taken to eliminate the redundancy and wastage of time that tags along at times with it. By doing that, it will make your team schedule more efficient and productive. Make all your efforts to keep everyone in the loop so that they are aware of whatever important ensued in the meeting.

In fact, asking each team member to create a list of everything they accomplished last week and their top tasks to be achieved in the forthcoming week. This will keep everyone aligned to the goals and will enable them to stay on track. Holding inefficient meetings for long hours that achieve hardly anything are of little use. Organizations should realize that meetings can be quite incredibly productive.

Track Efficiency Goals & Measuring 

Once you have defined all the short term and long term goals, set specific schedules and timelines for achieving them. After achieving each goal, set a new one for yourself. You should remember always that efficiency means not only speed but also effectiveness. If whatever has been achieved is not of supreme quality and effective, it does not serve any purpose.

Keep a sharp eye on all the metrics, number of hours worked and the milestones achieved during those hours and days. How do we measure productivity? In fact, you can record exact time spent on each and every activity within your organization and calculate exactly the duration it takes for completing individual tasks by each team member to know the productivity per hour.