Five tips to higher team productivity

Meeting in the conference room

Building teams is a critical skill for any project manager. Once the team is built, it’s important to keep the team’s productivity high. Here are several suggestions for helping to increase your team’s productivity and manage their workflow.

Keep meetings to a minimum

Meetings are necessary and universally hated. But just because no one admits they like meetings doesn’t mean they don’t have a purpose.

Ask the team how many meetings there should be and the time allotted. Get consensus from the team and listen to it.

I’ve found that, in general, I schedule meetings at least once every week when in the planning stages of the project. As we move into execution, sometimes we go to group status meetings every two weeks. As we get close to delivery, daily scrums are often started.

Every team is different

Every team is different. Keep meetings to a minimum and make sure the team in on board with whatever schedule you use. People who are working are more productive.

Make sure meetings are useful

Have an agenda. Use it. Keep the meeting on track. Start on time and end on time.

When you properly manage a meeting, people appreciate it. They are more likely to attend and participate in a meeting they know respects their time.

When your team feels you are respecting their time, they are more likely to

cooperate with you. As a bonus, they often get more done.

Micromanagement kills productivity

If your company is hiring good people, let them do their jobs. Don’t hover over people and don’t constantly bother them for information.

Micro-managing your team makes them resentful of your interference, and over time, the work slows as the team members wait for manager approval for every move.

Keep people accountable

Be sure to keep everyone accountable. If someone doesn’t deliver, work with them to fix the problem. If it happens again, there may need to be a change.

People are more productive if you let them do what they were hired to do.

Be very clear when assigning tasks and dates

As a project manager, it is your job to make sure everyone is crystal-clear about what it is they need to do and by when. If you have done this job well, status meetings should be short and quick.

Consider it a red flag when someone can’t really tell you how far along they are or when they can be done. If the task is not defined enough to know when it’s complete, work on that task until the deliverable is obvious.

Ambiguous tasks and team members who are not clear on their assignments slow everyone down. Fix it immediately.

Avoid disrupting the team’s workflow

Once the team’s workflow has been decided, avoid making changes. Have meetings at the same time, preferably in the same place with a similar agenda. Make sure everyone has the meetings on their calendar.

If you have a reporting process, don’t make changes to it without team approval and buy-in.  The reports need to be in on the same day at the same time. Keeping these standard workflows unchanged means the team can focus on their work, not on when the next meeting or report is due.

Standardize processes

If possible, have a standard process for reporting as well. Whether it’s an email response or entering updates into a database, standardize the process and enforce it. Once folks learn the system, they don’t have to think about it any longer.

Consider this: When you drive your car to work, do you spend a lot of time thinking about whether to stop at a red light or how fast you should travel? No – these laws are decided and you have learned them. You don’t reconsider stopping at every red light or whether or not to drive through a green light. You just drive.

Make your team member’s workflow so natural they just do it. Your team will be more productive.

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What hints or tips do you have to make your team more productive? Tell us in the comments below.