How to drive productivity growth within your team

Many employees are working longer hours and feeling more stressed by their workloads than ever before.

Businesses have asked their people to adjust to home-working challenges and to learn to work together in remote teams.

Team managers or leaders are responsible for driving productivity growth and focusing team members on working smarter, not harder. This is critical for reducing employee stress and building engagement.

This article will look at why productivity growth is important for teams, plus common obstacles to maximizing productivity and how to tackle them.

Why is productivity important?

We’re working longer hours than ever before, with 10% of the global population working over 55 hours a week.

And it’s costing us our health: working over 55 hours a week puts people at an increased risk of serious diseases such as strokes and heart attacks.

The ‘burnout’ that comes from chronic workplace stress was recently added to the International Classification of Disease register by the World Health Organization.

During the Covid-19 pandemic — and despite the majority of us working from home — the average workday for a US employee actually increased by 48 minutes as we tried to navigate new working practices.

All of this is significantly affecting our relationships and mental and physical health.

So, what’s the answer?

Well, being more productive — or working smarter, not harder — could provide a way to get the same amount of work done in less time. Which gives your team more free time to focus on exercise, hobbies, family, and sleep.

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What blocks productivity?

So, if we all want to maximize our productivity, what’s stopping us?

There are several factors that can block productivity at both an individual and organizational level.

Let’s take a look at the top 5:

Rigid working practices

When it comes to how we like to work, we’re all unique individuals with unique preferences.

Some of us are energized by a busy working environment and are most creative when vibing with colleagues.

Others find an office environment distracting and find it hard to stay in the zone when interrupted by colleagues or surrounded by noise.

Having less choice over the way and how we work can reduce productivity. This means employers that enforce rigid working practices are likely not getting the best from their people.

Focusing on the wrong things

Productivity diminishes when we spend time on work that doesn’t drive value.

While tackling everything on your to-do list may feel productive, if the work you’re doing isn’t impactful, you’re wasting your effort.

As managers, we should care about how we’re using our people.

Making sure you allow employees to focus on work that’s more meaningful than mundane creates business value. Plus, it also increases employee engagement, putting you in line for #manageroftheyear.

You also need to ensure your metrics reflect the culture you’re trying to create.

You don’t want to harp on about prioritizing value-add activity only to time-track every task to the nth degree. Focus on the return on investment — the impact that’s delivered — instead.

And nip micro-management in the bud. It stifles productivity — as employees can’t organize their work in a way that suits them — as well as wasting your valuable time.

Not having the right skills

It’s not surprising that things take longer when people lack the skills or experience to get the job done.

There can be several reasons for skills deficits in employees, from poor recruitment practice to evolving job requirements.

As a manager, it’s your responsibility to assess the capability of your team and find development opportunities to plug any gaps.

It’s also essential to create a working environment that helps your team share when they’re struggling so you can make sure you get them the proper support.

Working in silos

Poor communication between departments and a lack of cross-functional collaboration can seriously impact productivity.

A study by the Economist found 44% of respondents thought poor communication impacted project delivery, and 25% believed it contributed to missed performance goals.

List of key impacts of poor communication with a circle next to each item containing % of respondents

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Which isn’t that surprising. Siloed work reduces the opportunity for collaboration and process optimization across departments and results in inconsistent working practices.

Plus, it’s harder to track and add to the information, which can result in unreliable data sharing.

This means teams can often spend a large portion of their day collating and making sense of information rather than actually getting things done.

Procrastination

While businesses have a role to play in supporting productivity growth, so do individuals.

Procrastination is a productivity killer, and it’s something many of us struggle with. According to a UK survey, office workers are only productive for 3 hours of each working day.

Distractions like social media, as well as procrastination activities like gossiping with colleagues or making coffee, took up the rest of the day.

And it’s certainly not easier to manage when working remotely, where the list of distractions might also include our partners, kids, pets, and overflowing laundry baskets.

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How can we overcome these obstacles?

Ok, so we’re all aware that there’s a range of things out there just waiting to stifle your productivity growth.

So what can we do about them?

Let’s break down a few ways to battle the productivity blockers.

Enable flexible working

Employees supported by their employer to work flexibly were 86% more productive.

And, with 98% of employees wanting the option to continue working remotely after 2020, businesses are working hard to consider ways to accommodate new working practices.

If your team is predominantly remote, encourage them to develop, and stick to, a working routine that works for them as much as possible.

A consistent routine can help trick the brain into settling into work mode, which helps to tackle procrastination and build productivity.

For instance, monday.com makes planning work simple with clearly laid out boards that show who’s working on what as well as what’s next in the pipeline, due dates, and task status.

Make your data work for you

It’s critical to use a reporting system that helps you track the information that’s important to you.

Get clear on what metrics help you monitor productivity and use your data smartly to set goals that motivate your team to grow their productivity.

monday.com makes all that simple with its powerful reporting capabilities.

Whether it’s tracking project progress, sales numbers, or revenue targets, monday.com’s colorful and fully customizable dashboards help you keep on top of the information you need.

Effective data reporting helps you spot bottlenecks in your process and opportunities for improvement. Optimizing how work gets done is a key driver of productivity growth.

Build collaboration

To really accelerate your productivity growth, look for opportunities for cross-functional collaboration.

This can actually benefit your productivity in 2 distinct ways. Firstly, it reduces the issues found with siloed working and increases the opportunity for process optimization.

Secondly, skills can be shared between teams and teammates, supporting the development of less experienced team members.

Plus, a problem shared is a problem halved. Outside influence can help teams look at issues in a new light and may drive innovative solutions.

monday.com is excellent at driving effective collaboration. With a shared digital platform, you have a single source of truth for all your data. Plus, you can easily share, view, and annotate documents, plus @tag colleagues for their input.

Communication can happen in-platform or through a range of integrations with tools your team is probably already using.

Plus, building robust collaboration mechanisms also supports your team to work more flexibly by keeping communication between remote and in-office workers effective.

Encourage effective time management practices

The procrastination struggle is real. Help your team to beat it by modeling a team matrix that prioritizes urgent and important work.

The Eisenhower matrix is a model that plots tasks against a scale of urgency and importance. Named after President Dwight D. Eisenhower, it’s a smart way to identify where to focus your energy.

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Urgent and important tasks top the pecking order, and some tasks may be eliminated entirely.

Once they’ve seen the team version, employees can also build their own.

This should help prioritize all the tasks they have to get done, so they know where to place their effort when they’re winning the procrastination battle.

And, for all those repetitive, mundane tasks that still need doing, why not consider automation? monday.com has hundreds of automation recipes that can allow your employees to focus on more value-adding work.