Employee productivity is critical in every organization. Motivating and empowering employees to perform excellently and move the organization forward is necessary.
Many managers find it challenging to increase team productivity. If you fall into this category, you have arrived at the right place to help solve your issues. We’ll explain 10 proven ways to increase team productivity and help your organization succeed.
What is Team Productivity?
In traditional economics, productivity measures the efficiency of a person, factory, machine, or system. It's measured by comparing a person or system's output with a single input over a specific period.
For modern workplaces, productivity measures how efficiently a person completes a task, and team productivity evaluates how proficiently a group of employees perform their duties.
Team productivity can be measured by how many tasks a team completes over a specific period. For example, how many tickets does a customer support team complete every day? How many items does a factory produce daily? However, numbers don’t always tell the whole story. You should focus more on quality than quantity.
A team’s productivity correlates with its economic value. The more productive people are, the more money they’ll earn. Similarly, the more productive an organization is, the more revenue it’ll earn.
10 Ways to Increase Team Productivity
1. Good communication
Communication is the foundation of team productivity. Employees must communicate effectively with each other to complete goals and tasks. There should be formal communication processes to keep every team member in tune with others. Employees should be able to contact each other with inquiries and be willing to exchange solutions when needed.
Foster a culture where communication is encouraged. Hold meetings between team members to make them comfortable talking with each other. As a manager, make employees feel comfortable asking questions and learning from you. Give subordinates a chance to respond to your feedback and get their perspectives on relevant issues. This applies to both in-person and remote workforces.
Active listening is another crucial aspect of good communication. Fully engage with colleagues and seek to understand their viewpoints even when you disagree. Maintain eye contact during conversations and avoid distractions. Active listening indicates value and respect for the person you’re speaking with. It helps create a culture where people are willing to speak up and contribute to important matters.
You can also master the art of non-verbal communication. Your body language, tone, and facial expressions say much without uttering words. You should look approachable and use a friendlier tone when speaking.
2. Reward employees’ efforts
Reward people’s efforts and make them feel appreciated when they achieve goals and complete tasks. There’s no better way to foster productivity than acknowledging and rewarding existing efforts.
If you’re a business owner, you can give one-time bonuses as rewards (managers may not have this power). Otherwise, there are many non-monetary methods of rewarding staff. You can let high-performing employees take additional paid time off to attend to personal affairs. You can give out company swags to make them feel appreciated. You can give handwritten notes or praise the employee in meetings.
It’s vital to reward work quality and not quantity; many managers mix up both. It’s not about how long someone works but the results they achieve. For example, someone on your support team answers a lot of tickets but gets low customer satisfaction scores. A colleague answers fewer tickets but is praised by the customers they interact with. You’re better off rewarding the second person and not the first.
When team members notice your rewards, they’ll be encouraged to put in the required work to perform better.
3. Lead by example
As a leader, your mantra should be “Do as I do,” not “Do as I say.” The team culture starts with the leader. If you want to encourage high productivity, start by being very productive. Put considerable effort into every task, working even harder than your subordinates.
Whatever effort you demand, you must first practice. If you want people to show up early at the office, show up to work early. If you want people to complete projects timely, be timely in whatever you do. Your behavior inspires other people to work more effectively and improve productivity.
4. Set realistic goals
You should set realistic goals for employees and avoid being a perfectionist. The goals should be clear, concise, and something employees can feasibly achieve. Setting unrealistic goals is a major problem in many organizations, wherein managers blame employees for not meeting up to seemingly ridiculous goals.
Be considerate when setting corporate goals. Consider whether your employees can achieve the goals with their current headcount and working pace. If not, it’s a sign to adjust the goals or hire the needed headcount to achieve them.
Give room for mistakes, and be willing to correct the ones you observe. Otherwise, employees would take ages to achieve goals because they want to deliver perfect work and avoid your anger, dragging down the productivity you desire.
It’s not enough to set goals and disconnect. Be available to guide employees and answer inquiries as they work to achieve those goals. Provide insights at different points to help them perform better. Don’t hesitate to correct employees when required and boost their confidence.
5. Create a healthy working culture
Creating a healthy working culture goes a long way in increasing productivity. It’s counterintuitive to be a hard-charging manager bossing your employees around. People don’t perform continuously well under stress, so you should avoid creating a stressful working environment.
Let employees know that it's okay to take breaks when needed, it's okay to take some time to attend to personal affairs, and it’s encouraged to ask for help with work-related activities. You can occasionally talk about non-corporate affairs with your employees. What are their hobbies? Do they have enough time to attend to family affairs? Are they happy with the working culture? Etc. If all you do is emphasize work and push employees to toil for longer hours, you’ll likely cause burnout.
We’ve already talked about good communication, but it’s worth another mention in the context of fostering a healthy working culture. You should communicate with employees and help them build the right effective mindset.
6. Allow flexible working schedules
Employees must not all follow the same rigid working schedules, especially for remote workforces. People work productively at different times, and allowing employees to work when they can perform best is helpful. If feasible, allow employees to work from home or hybrid (office + home).
Many studies point to remote work being just as productive and, in some cases, more productive than in-person work. Flexible schedules help build loyalty and motivate employees to work efficiently.
Of course, remote work is not feasible in some industries, e.g., manufacturing and healthcare. However, if it’s viable in your industry, don’t hesitate to offer it to employees.
7. Identify strengths and weaknesses
Identifying your team's strengths and weaknesses is crucial to improving productivity. Once you identify your team's strengths, you can focus on building them up to make up for the weaknesses.
Identify team members with specific skills and give them tasks related to those skills; people perform better at things they love working on. For instance, if you observe that one of your programmers enjoys writing technical documentation and tutorials but dislikes working on your codebase, you can put them in charge of documentation projects. This programmer will still contribute to the codebase, as it’s their job, but letting them do something they love increases their productivity.
8. Provide appropriate tools
Ensure your employees have the right tools to perform their jobs. No matter how good your strategy and teamwork building is, employees can’t be productive without the proper tools to carry out tasks.
For example, programmers should be given high-performing laptops/PCs to work with. They should have the required storage and server space to build software tools. Give employees what they need even if it bites into your budget. Investing in the right tools and getting good results is better than penny-pinching and receiving mediocre results.
9. Prioritize your tasks
Set clear priorities and be transparent with employees about them. You should prioritize tasks based on importance, letting employees know which one to focus on at a specific time. Don’t just delegate tasks and let employees take it from there; they’ll likely be confused about which ones to put more effort into.
The most common way of prioritizing tasks is by setting deadlines. Your deadlines let employees know which tasks to focus on during a specific period. However, recognize that deadlines aren’t written in stone; they can be adjusted if required to let your employees deliver better work.
10. Avoid micromanagement
Micromanagement is the bane of many organizations. You don’t need to control every aspect of your employees’ work and be obsessed with every minor detail. Employees need autonomy to perform at their best levels. Micromanagement signals to employees that you don’t trust them enough to handle their work, making them less confident and less creative.
Give your employees independence and flexibility if you want them to work well and improve their productivity. Micromanagement does nothing but complicate work and hamper productivity.
The main factors affecting productivity
You’ve learned 10 proven ways to increase your team’s productivity. Learning about the main factors affecting team productivity is also crucial. These factors include:
1. Compensation
How much employees get paid plays a considerable role in their productivity. People have bills to pay and must keep up with living expenses. Compensating employees appropriately motivates them to be more productive.
As an employer, you should compensate employees at least within the market rate in your locality. You’re free to surpass the typical rates to attract talent, but you should never be cheap on employee compensation. You might get away with paying low amounts, but it’ll be difficult to attract the right talent doing so.
Your pay structure should be transparent. Employees should know their salary breakdown (base salary, bonuses, equity, etc.). Have clear guidelines on how employees qualify for promotions and raises.
2. Training & professional development
Virtually every employee wants to grow and develop their career. Hence, they become more productive when their organization invests in their education and training. As an employer, you should offer educational perks to employees to help them hone their skills. This way, employees gain industry knowledge and use it to develop their organization.
Many companies cover educational expenses to a specific level for workers. For instance, you can give workers a fixed annual budget for industry certifications. You can subscribe to educational platforms for your employees, e.g., Pluralsight for general IT courses and A Cloud Guru for cloud computing courses.
Alongside investing in their education, allow employees to grow within the company. People get discouraged from being productive if they see that their efforts will hardly result in a career boost.
3. Organizational processes
Your organizational processes are critical to your company’s productivity. Everything from employee onboarding to the communication chain, performance management, human resource management, and more greatly affects your organization.
You should develop effective employee management processes to maintain optimal productivity. The processes should be as seamless as possible, with little friction for employees to achieve their goals. Overt bureaucracy hinders productivity, so you should avoid setting unnecessary rules for employees.
4. Leadership
Company culture and productivity emanate from the leadership. Your organization needs leaders with clear visions and goals to drive it forward; you should assemble a team of intelligent and pragmatic executives to steer the boat. Leaders with unclear goals and prone to erratic decisions can hamper employee morale and reduce productivity.
Conclusion
We have explained 10 proven ways to improve workplace productivity for your team. We also discussed the main factors affecting workplace productivity. Follow our tips, and you’ll likely maintain a healthy working culture that boosts employee productivity.
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