You are an entrepreneur who have established a successful business. Your business was flourishing, and everything was working according to the plan until you started noticing a sharp decline in your employee productivity graph. Despite your efforts, the employee productivity graph continues to slip further down.
This situation starts to give you some sleepless nights and even when you sleep, you get nightmares. You might be thinking about how you can stop that productivity slide and pull that graph back up. If that is what you are thinking then, you are at the right place.
In this article, you will learn about ways in which how business leaders can keep them team on the same page and boost their team’s productivity.
1. Set the Right Expectation Straightaway
Poor team communication and collaboration is one of the biggest reasons behind poor productivity. When your team members don’t go along well with one another and there is lack of coordination between your team members, you will never be able to achieve your productivity goals.
When you don’t tell your employees what to do and what you expect from them, they will try to figure it out themselves and there are brighter chances they might end up making a mess of it. That is why it is important that you clearly tell your employees what you expect from them and clearly define their roles and responsibilities.
Brief your team about end goal you want to achieve. Encourage your team members to ask questions if they have any and be physically present to answer their questions. This will help you set the right employee expectation from the beginning which would minimize the risk of confusions and misunderstandings.
Simon Sinek summed it up brilliantly when he said, “More information is always better than less. When people know the reason things are happening, even if it’s bad news, they can adjust their expectations and react accordingly. Keeping people in the dark only serves to stir negative emotions.”
2. Never Bite Off More Than You Can Chew
“Don’t bite off more than you can chew because nobody looks attractive spitting it back out.”—Carroll Bryant
One of the common mistakes most business leaders and managers make is they sign projects that they are not capable to complete. Irrespective of whether they don’t have the human resources, budget or time, they do this to make a lasting impression. As a result, they end up paying extra pressure on their team.
You don’t want to be overwhelming them with too much to do because then they would be rushing through tasks, which would hamper the quality of the output. Striking the right balance between number of tasks you complete and how efficiently you complete them is critical for success.
Successful business leaders are aware of the strengths and weaknesses of every team members. That is why they take the horses for courses approach when assigning tasks. They usually provide an environment where employees can succeed by giving them tasks that they are not only capable of handling but very good at it too. That is why employees tends to give their best shot every time, leveraging the team’s productivity to new heights.
3. Prioritize and Outsource
“Cheaper Workforce would have led the pack five years ago. Focusing resources on core capabilities, provide a more efficient workforce.”—Mike Mills, Senior Vice President CGS Contact Center Solutions
With so much on our plates daily, it is important to prioritize tasks because we cannot do all of these tasks at once. If possible, try to automate or outsource mundane tasks and reduce the burden from your team shoulders. This will help them to focus their attention on important, value centric tasks. With less to do, they will also do every task efficiently which increases the quality of output you deliver. As a result, level of customer satisfaction goes up and they will come back to you again and again.
Join hands with freelancers, agencies or consultants to outsource some of your work so your team can breathe easy. When you delegate some of the tasks to different partners, it gives your employees access to additional external resources, which not only help with their skill development and personal growth but also help them work as a team player in cross functional teams. The end result is sharp increase in your productivity by manifolds by delegating, outsourcing and collaborating on projects with others.
4. Analyze Results and Improve
Numbers don’t lie, and we all know that. Despite that, most businesses never take an in depth look at their numbers and try to find the root cause for their declining employee productivity. They can easily identify the culprit if they dig deeper and analyze results. Additionally, compare results of this with previous years will show you a clear picture about how much things have changed when it comes to employee productivity. That is where a top task management software like Asana, Taskque, can help you out.
By identifying the loopholes, you can easily work towards improving it and iron out issues that are hampering your productivity. Instead trying to change everything instantly, take the slow and steady approach and introduce measures to fix the productivity problems. Once people start to get use to these measures, it will become an integral part of your organization culture. That is when your employees start to complete tasks efficiently and effectively.
How do you boost your team productivity? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.
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