3 Essential Productivity Tips for Teams
Managing an effective, productive team is not only rewarding but profitable. Keeping your team synched and focused means projects are accomplished quickly, on schedule and on budget. Often, with the right collaboration tools and organization, teams can even come in under budget.
How can your team be more productive? There are many schools of thought and methods you can use, but here are three tips that will help you keep your team productive and effective.
1. Collaboration – This is the glue that keeps a team together; without this any team would fail. Tuckman (American psychologist) suggests that are four stages: forming, storming, norming and performing in order to evolve, confront problems, obtain solutions and hand-over results, as a team. Every member should understand his role, and the importance of it for that matter, in the team and his performance importance. The established norms for conflict settling and decision-making should be made very clear from the beginning.
2. Focus! – Busy company, busy workers; that sounds like a dream come true to any business owner. But sometimes things aren’t as good as they sound. The ability to focus can highly diminish with too many projects in hand. Teams should be assigned with one project at a time, otherwise the risk to take up a new one and forget about the old one is high. People tend to easily let go of the “old”, so the prospect of a fresh, new assignment is very tempting. Trying to set up a reward system can work in this case. Focusing on the actual task should be put first and foremost.
3. Consequences – Before any team begins its activity, any team manager should make clear the consequences of their acts. Positive results should be rewarded and negative rewards should be “punished”. Recognition of the group or of a member for best results should be shared with the whole organization.
Henry Ford, one of the legends of automobile industry, once said: “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” That’s the motto that should be applied in any team workplace, to allow the members a feeling of prosperity, triumph and boost their confidence.
