Monday, January 19, 2015

8 Productivity-Enhancing Tips for Teams

You've put together your dream team; now you want to get the best out of them. Here are eight tips to maximize their productivity.

1. Make sure your team shares your mission.

You might think the objectives of your company are obvious, but unless you clearly articulate them to the team, not everyone will be on the same page. Even if things run late, you'll benefit from taking a bit of time to clearly list for your dream team what the goals of your company are and how all of you plan to accomplish them.

2. Have shared workspace.

Shared digital workspaces are a vital tool for your team to share documents, internally communicate with one another, and track progress. Shared databases mean that everybody can access all data all the time and work with one another in an informed and cohesive unit. If your objective includes increasing team productivity, you ought to be assessing tools by how well they will support your goals.

3. Develop a culture that encourages discussion.

Teams require time to talk about problems that come up within the course of business. All through those discussions, valuable insights may be discovered and typically these perspectives come up during a one-on-one discussion. You must develop a culture in which discussion is valued and done in various ways, from telephone and video conferences to email, as well as microblogging for those times your employees cannot sit around a table and discuss things.  But be careful of time management within one-on-one meetings. An excellent meeting is not excessively long and allows all members the opportunity to voice an opinion.

4. Make task lists.

It's vital that your team has a mutual comprehension of the activities that must be accomplished to keep things rolling. Use a task list to formalize the to-dos required to keep the business properly functioning and update it routinely. To-do lists assist in focusing the team.

5. Develop processes as a portion of business culture.

Process includes a method of automating the best practices to get things accomplished in the most efficient way. Running solid processes will mean that your team isn't always re-inventing the wheel. Great process will evolve with learning and expertise. As you have a process which works, make it a portion of your business culture.

6. Stop sending an overload of emails to the team.

According to one survey of the impact of social media and email on productivity, email is among the main distractions in the workplace. Begin to use alternative methods of communicating with the team to eliminate difficult-to-track email chains and to save the time it takes to frequently check email.

Google Docs, Wikis, and virtual meetings all are great alternatives. Utilize Microsoft Project and SharePoint to manage massive quantities of project information on the internet, manage calendars, share documents, assign tasks, and so much more.

7. Work within 40-minute periods for maximum productivity.

Rather than working for a couple of minutes at one time, or going on social media, then checking email, or leaping to another idea or project, encourage the team to work within 40-minute bursts of concentrated work. Via research that is detailed within his Accomplishing More With Less workbook and workshop, Pierre Khawand, founder of PeopleOnTheGo, explains that only 40 minutes of interruption-free effort will get the brain working to the point that breakthrough achievements may be reached.

8. Schedule and prepare for collaborative time

Projects will require lots of collaboration--therefore, be certain you plan for it within a productive way. Following 40-minute concentrated work sessions, have the team collaboratively work for 20 minutes and then return to their individual activities at hand. That way, everybody remains concentrated on their results.

This short list is going to guide members of the team to where they should go next. And finally, foster an atmosphere that is free from outside distractions. Remind staff not to interrupt each other's work sessions, and do not be a distracting manager yourself unless the reason is urgent.

 

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