As a manager or business owner, revenue is the name of the game. And productivity is one of the most important driving factors in generating revenue. If your team isn't productive, you aren’t going to consistently hit your revenue goals. The question is, where do you start?
4 Ways to Boost Team Productivity
Productivity might be easy to measure on a macro scale, but it’s often difficult to propagate on a micro scale. In other words, everyone is different. What makes one person productive might actually hinder another person (or vice versa).
Having said that, here are several tactics that tend to work across the board:
1. Lead By Example
It’s easy to get so caught up in what your team is or isn’t doing that you forget to look in the mirror and address your own productivity and output.
“The first step is to get your own house in order (if it’s not already) and exhibit good time management practices yourself,” Rebecca Knight writes for Harvard Business Review. “Be smart about how you allocate the hours of your own workday—the meetings you attend, the emails you respond to, and the projects you sign on for—so your team can follow your lead.”
When you make a commitment to leading by example, it strengthens the integrity of the culture. People don’t just hear you – they see you and respect you. There’s a sense of consistency between what you say and what you do.
2. Switch to a 4-Day Workweek
We often assume there’s a direct correlation between how many hours an employee works and their productivity. However, this is rarely true. The average employee reaches a point of diminishing returns where working more hours actually has a negative impact on their productivity. It’s up to you to find the sweet spot.
For many employees, that sweet spot is right around four days (as opposed to the standard five days that most businesses subscribe to). In fact, according to the recruiters at Recruiters.co, 60 percent of organizations that adopt a four-day workweek see gains in employee satisfaction and productivity when transitioning from a standard five-day workweek.
The key to making a four-day workweek work is to be very intentional about what gets scheduled on those four days. There’s obviously less time to get work done, so the focus has to be turned up a notch. If this is something you choose to do, you’ll want to include your employees in the decision-making process and get their total buy-in.
3. Rethink Meetings
Few things kill productivity on a team quite like meetings. Professionals average 25.6 meetings per week (or roughly 5.1 per day). The total number of meetings has ballooned by 69.7 percent since February 2020 (when the average was just 15.1 meetings per week). And here’s the problem: Most of these meetings are a colossal waste of time.
Here are the biggest problems with most meetings:
- Too many people are invited, which results in two issues. First, it’s a waste of time for the people who aren’t integral to the meeting and don’t need to be there. Secondly, it creates unnecessary noise and distractions for the folks who do need to be there. If you want meetings to work for your business, limit the number of attendees to no more than three to five people.
- Meetings don’t start on time. There’s too much small talk at the beginning (or the meeting host waits until everyone arrives to start). You can correct this problem by making a commitment to always start at the stated time, even if people haven’t shown up yet. (Your team will learn very quickly.)
- Meetings are held for issues that could be addressed with a simple phone call. If you can pick up the phone and address something in 10 minutes or less with one other individual, there’s no need for holding a meeting.
4. Grant Autonomy
You might think you're setting your team up for success by micromanaging their daily schedules, but you might be holding them back. One of the keys to enhancing productivity on an individual basis is to let them control their daily schedule.
“Give your employees permission to make decisions on which meetings they attend (or skip), which email lists they are party to, and which responsibilities they hand off,” Knight writes.
It’s a good idea to encourage team members to block out time on their calendars to get work done. A failure to carve out time like this will make them more prone to distractions.
Putting it All Together
By no means is this a comprehensive set of productivity tips. It does, however, give you several easy strategies that you can put into action right away to experience some immediate traction.
There is no magic bullet for productivity. If you want your team to be productive, you have to layer different techniques together. Use this article as a foundation to get started moving in the right direction.