How to strengthen your team’s productivity as a manager
A united team leads a successful business. When you choose the people who will help you to achieve success, you need to look beyond the present situation and see the bigger picture. At some point, your management knowledge won’t be enough to sustain the group’s needs and performance and productivity, so you’ll have to come up with innovative ideas to keep them motivated.
Working on yourself has the same importance as working on your team. As a leader, you need to have a set of skills to control and adapt to each situation in your favour. It would help if you aimed for continuous self-improvement to be prepared for any new challenges. If you can professionally handle everything in your business, you can influence your team to have the same goals and strike for development. Therefore, here’s what you can do to increase your team’s productivity.
Employee engagement
As a manager, your job won’t stop at signing papers and assigning tasks. You need to pay attention to your team’s assets and focus on their improvement. It’s easier to manage a smaller group because you’ll get to know everyone properly, find each person’s secret talent and nurture it. This is employee engagement; being involved in your team’s personal development and satisfaction. Here are some practices that will help you in this matter:
Encourage self-expression at the workplace. Let your team develop ideas and express their concerns about certain actions that you want to pursue. This will cultivate self-worth, and help your business be more interactive with clients (by having open-minded employees).
Provide benefits and incentives. One way to engage is to have a motivated team. Salary is not enough for employee satisfaction, so you might as well consider giving event tickets, training opportunities and compensatory time off.
Understand the power of recognition. Your team needs to know that they’re valued for their efforts and inputs. You’ll be surprised to see that recognition and appreciation will improve the productivity and self-confidence of each member.
Professional courses
Employee training and courses aim to offer more value to the company. You should measure your team’s productivity according to your business goals; but to do it, you have to help them acquire specific skills to be able to reach those standards.
You should look for courses that award your team’s efforts and achievements. For example, you can propose a Lean six sigma certification at the next team meeting. This project provides courses, online seminars, and classrooms to pursue improvement methods for professionals. The key objectives are to eliminate the wastefulness of physical and human resources. You’ll need these courses to develop a suitable plan of action for your company.
This Lean six sigma certification is accredited and recognized internationally, so it’s beneficial if you have an overseas business. At the same time, training is provided in many different languages. Besides this remarkable feature, these courses will ensure practical approaches, modern learning methods and continuous improvement.
Effective delegation
The concept of delegation is one of the effective priority system elements. In the Eisenhower Matrix, you have four quadrants where you’ll organise your tasks based on urgency and relevance. In the third quadrant, you will place the tasks that are urgent but not that important; therefore, the responsibilities you’ll delegate to someone capable of completing them.
How is an effective delegation beneficial for your team? It’s important to let your co-workers know that they are competent enough to deal with challenging tasks. It will improve their self-esteem and build relationships based on trust. Also, assigning certain tasks to your team will fill any knowledge gaps about your business or work ethic.
To succeed with this method, you need to allocate people the simplest assignments in the first place. Then, by learning about everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, you’ll match the tasks to the right individual. Your team will feel acknowledged, which will lead to ambitious attitudes towards work.
Finally, you need people that match their personal values to your company's. Your team’s technical skills will be an essential tool for success, but if they can’t identify common beliefs with your business, it’s time to re-evaluate your goals or change your management style.
Balanced workload
It’s easy to slip into overworking yourself and your team. Even if it’s still said that you can achieve anything if you work hard enough, that doesn’t mean you need to work overtime and fall into burnout. Think about working efficiently (without wasting time, energy, and materials) rather than effectively (to get to the desired result by any means).
To generate a balanced workload, you need to have organisational, time-management and effective delegation skills. Here are a few tips on how you can manage your team’s workload:
Clearly define your business’s goals. Be specific about what you want to achieve; at the same time, be open to any changes that might occur.
Teach your teammates how to delegate their tasks to someone else.
Learn to say no. Many opportunities seem reachable, but as you experience more situations where you took the position of the “Yes man”, you realise that it’s better to settle down in most circumstances.
Remember that if you don’t provide a balanced schedule for your team and demand overtime work, they might enter into a state of physical and emotional exhaustion. The consequences will show up in time: your team will experience feelings of anxiety and irritability, eventually leading to burnout. This will affect productivity and creativity performance, and you’ll end up with unpleasant results that could’ve been avoided.
To conclude, employee satisfaction is the base of a successful company. Professionally treating your team and understanding their needs and personal characteristics will make you a good leader that they’ll look up to and help your business flourish.
Be sure to invest in their development to add value to your company through their newly acquired skills. Enrol your team in courses and training to keep up with the newest learning methods. And last, but not least, follow the leader within you and try improving yourself constantly to be an example for your teammates.
