The best teams at your company can still run into roadblocks that get in the way of productivity. Whether it is email bloat, unprotective meetings, or miscommunication, you can find your company in dire straits when your employees aren’t meeting their goals and crossing off items on their to-do list. Rather than letting time take the life out of your company, here are some tips to improve the quality of your team’s efforts and keep things on track.
Reduce Employee Meetings
While you may not think meetings are a waste of time, reducing how often you pull everyone together for a meeting can improve the company’s efficiency. Not that meetings are bad altogether, but without a clear agenda, a focused group of attendees, and an atmosphere of contribution, the results aren’t always worth the effort. If you want to get an update on a project, could you do it digitally or make a phone call? Limiting unnecessary meeting gives your people more time to focus on the tasks and work that matter.
Establish a Priority Schedule
Your employees may have several tasks on their daily agenda, and all of them may seem urgent and important. Without direction, employees may not know which project should get their full attention or even where to start. Defining a set of goals, for both the short and long-term, will provide a foundation for sifting through which projects should be put first and which can come later. Build your long-term goals through the short-term ones, making sure that all tasks align with your company visions. Make sure you realize how these decisions will affect the work ladder for all areas of the company.
Rely on Efficient Communication
There are a lot of communication tools your team has at their disposal, but only when they are used at the right time and in the right way do they help your team. For outside communications, email or a linked phone system will work to keep in touch with vendors. To help your employees get answers to their questions or dialogue about projects, an app like Slack works well. Work management tools also help keep up with employees and the work they are putting into a project, giving you data to check up on progress and letting the team collaborate on remaining project needs.
Know Your Team’s Strengths
Your team is made of individuals that have different strengths, weaknesses, skills, and experiences that they bring to each project. Different people also like to work on different things, making them better in certain areas of a project. When you can tap into these strengths and interests, it can make a huge difference in the effort that is put into a project. Make sure you are assigning people to tasks they enjoy or have specific strengths in that area to increase efficiency. When a person is excited about the work they are doing, there is a greater potential for higher quality and the desire for the job to get done more quickly.
Managing your team more efficiently improves your company’s bottom line. By motivating your employees through their strengths and making sure all your resources are used effectively, you give your company a chance to grow and thrive.