When you are looking after a team, there are all sorts of things that you may be hoping to achieve. One of the most important, and most common, is the need to have a high degree of productivity amongst the team. The more productive the team is, the more work you will get out of them, and the better that will be for the company as a whole.
Of course, it’s not always as easy as that to make it a reality. If you are in charge of a team of people and you want them to be more productive, you may well have your work cut out, and it might be that you need to make quite a few changes. In this post, we’ll take you through some of the most powerful of these, so you can hopefully have a much more productive team in no time.
Hire The Best For Each Role
First of all, you really need to make sure that you have the best people in each role in your team. That might sound obvious, but it’s nonetheless something that you should definitely try to focus on if you are going to effectively run your team and get more out of them. So when you are hiring people into the team, whether internally or externally, be sure to hire the best.
To ensure that, you have to know what ‘best’ means in the context of each specific role. The clearer you are on that, the more likely it is that you will find it. And once you do, things are going to start falling into place so much more easily and swiftly. Having great people turns out to be hugely important in this and in many other respects.
Set Smaller Goals
Often, teams are beset by a leader that gives them big picture goals to try and accomplish. While there is nothing wrong with that in itself, and it is often important to have one eye on the bigger picture, sometimes what you really need is to set some smaller goals for your team, and for the individuals in your team, so that they can be much more focused and are less likely to get caught up.
What those goals are will depend on the specifics of the team, and what you need from them. But the point is it keeps them busy towards the right goals, and allows you to watch what is happening more closely. All this helps productivity greatly.
Schedule People Properly
Perhaps one of the most important roles you have in your position as a team leader is to ensure that you are scheduling your people and their tasks properly. This is something that can take a while to perfect, as there is often a considerable learning curve. But over time, you should be able to make a success of it, and that is going to help you to lead your team to being so much more productive on the whole.
As is often the case, this is one of those things that are made a lot easier through the application of the proper tools. Find yourself a decent workforce scheduling software, and you will find that you are able to assign jobs and watch over the team’s productivity levels so much more fully and effectively. It’s really amazing what a difference it can make to have a tool like that at your disposal, so don’t discount this at all.
Keep The Lines Of Communication Open
Communication is essential when it comes to keeping a team productive. The more productive you can make your team, the more likely it is that they are going to work together well and fully at all times. This makes it easier to work through problems, and of course it just generally means that productivity is greatly improved. So, think about some of the things you can do to ensure the lines of communication are kept fully open at all times.
That might include introducing new ways of talking to one another, perhaps new tech or tools. And it might be more to do with culture: do people feel able to talk openly, or is there a restrictive feeling in the team hindering this? These are the two main angles to work on when you are trying to open communication up across your team.
Be Individually Productive Yourself
Good leaders are invariably good role models. If you want your team to be more productive, you will find it hugely helpful to be more productive yourself. Showing that it is possible, and desirable, and perhaps sharing a little of how you are doing it, is really useful in making it the reality for your team in general. So this is something that you should certainly think about if you want to make your team more productive.
Design A Conducive Environment
The working environment affects productivity considerably, of course, and it’s going to be important to think about this if you want to make sure that your team is being fully productive. Ideally, you will be able to design a conducive environment which your team is going to work in well. That means a space that is good for the kind of work you are doing, and which is comfortable to be in. It should also be a space that allows for people to make it their own, because that allows them an ergonomic approach to work which boosts productivity considerably.
