In today’s face-paced technological world, it’s essential to keep up with trends and boost your work efficiency. Whether you run a corporation or startup, maximizing your team’s productivity levels helps you achieve your goals much faster. 

Several industries heavily benefit from productivity and efficiency. The most affected are the following: 

• Retail 
• Human Resources
• Healthcare 
• Education 

However, how exactly do you get there? There are plenty of tips and tricks you can use to improve your productivity if you belong to any of these industries. 

Statistics show that the average employee is productive only 60% of their workday, but what can we do to increase this number?

Let’s dive deeper into this article to find out! 

8 Tips to follow for increasing team productivity and efficiency this year

1. Promote self-organization 

To increase your team’s productivity levels, you must promote self-organization. This means giving them autonomy for determining how they want to approach their tasks and not micro-managing them for every step. Self-organizing teams adapt to changes much more quickly and make decisions faster than waiting for others to do so. This reduces the time and effort you need to get something done. 

Self-organizing teams have ownership in their work and this helps them become more motivated and committed, which results in a much higher level of productivity. In addition, encouraging your team to share their knowledge can address all the areas you need for improvement and help increase it over time. 

Even though you may have a self-organizing team, it’s important that the managers set expectations for their team. This means you need to provide the proper guidance and direction for team members and give them the freedom to approach a project and task in the way that makes the most sense to them. Leaders can easily create a self-organizing team if they set a good balance. 

Keep in mind that having self-organizing teams isn’t always that easy and it does require changing how your organization operates, but the benefits are long-term. For example, let’s say you are in the healthcare industry and have to manage a team of nurse leaders that includes self-organizing teams. Nurses are always going back and forth, so it’s essential to organize teams to form innovative nurse care. 

Research shows that high-performing organizations are roughly eight times more likely to create workgroups and teams than those who perform average. 

2. Use employee scheduling software 

Employee scheduling software is highly effective for reducing costs, saving time and improving communication in retail stores. The software reduces labor costs, manages employee requests and tracks work hours in a few minutes. 

For example, if you are in the retailing industry, you can use retail schedule software to help manage working hours and any employee requests. You are in control and can edit and create your schedules easily. Therefore, it’ll be much easier for you to send messages and manage requests. In addition, the timesheets you’ll be using are automatically filled in. 

You can use employee scheduling software on free trials if you want to test it before using it. 

3. Focus on doing less

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Focusing on fewer tasks helps improve team productivity. However, staying motivated in the long term may be challenging when your team is focused on too many tasks. Moreover, loads of work may damage them and, thus, decrease productivity and efficiency. 

Alternatively, we have the part where team members focus on a small number of tasks and can give it their full attention. This leads to more quality work and fewer mistakes since team members can engage entirely with the work. 

If you want to identify the most important tasks for your team effectively, follow the 80/20 rule or the Pareto Principle. This concludes that when you focus on tasks that are more important to your team’s goals, you can allow your team to be more efficient and effective. Let’s not also forget that the Pareto Principle has widely been used in the education industry as well. 

Additionally, it’s important to grant your team members the necessary resources and support to complete their work. This may be software, the proper technologies, tools, training, support, and more. This way, your team will be satisfied and achieve more results while putting in less effort. 

4. Eliminate distractions 

According to Berkeley University, distractions will increase stress levels and double error rates. If error rates double and stress increases, what does this mean? More mistakes and less work done! 

Colleagues who want to chat, noisy kids, a bunch of emails, browsing on your phone, surfing the net, and many more distractions have a bad influence on the amount of work we manage to get done. Many distractions can get in the way of your daily tasks, whether you work at the office or from home. 

What are tips you should follow or advise your other team members to do so to avoid distraction? Here are the ones we recommend: 

• Surround yourself with people who aren’t distracted at the workplace
• Use a time tracker to complete your tasks 
• Take short breaks when you have the urge to 
• Set a home office if you are working remotely 
• Try using headphones to cut out distractions 
• Set aside time for checking social media and email notifications 

5. Don’t be afraid of communication 

Communication is essential if you want the business to succeed. Lack of communication is one of the main reasons team members fall into conflict or don’t entirely understand each other to succeed. 

Lots of businesses and almost all industries are built on communication and research shows that 71% of colleagues claimed they are more effective when communicating well with other employees. HR professionals claim that communication is a two-way process involving bottom-up questions from employees and top-down dissemination of HR plans. 

Furthermore, communication allows team members to understand the type of responsibilities their job has. Communication gaps lead to problems and can highly impact productivity. Whether onboarding new team members, training employees or creating an online course, keeping everyone aligned with the company’s goals is important. 

6. Set up meetings 

Meetings are important when you want to move forward with your team and identify if everyone is on the same track. According to statistics, 57% of participants who held meetings felt more up-to-date with the team’s progress and were more productive than those who didn’t. 

However, remember that all meetings don’t have to be in groups. You can conduct meetings either individually to solve any personal issues employees might have at the workplace. To make the meeting more interesting, try to set up one-on-one meetings with each of your colleagues and after, set up a group meeting. 

You won’t always have time to conduct one-on-one meetings, but you can let your team know they can contact you anytime. This way, there’ll be a stronger bond and you’ll feel more connected to your colleagues, increasing productivity at the workplace. 

7. Promote employee training 

Nearly 60% of employees claim they had no training when they started their new job. The competition nowadays is intense, but what most employers need to do is to train their employees. This is one advantage you already have if you choose to go with it. 

You can bring as many clients as you want to your company, but if you fail to provide the necessary training to improve each individual’s skills, you won’t successfully offer enough value to your clients. 

Regardless of the industry you are in, new employees need to always be appropriately trained. Without this, the company may increase turnover rates, low productivity levels and increase stress. 

Not only does this affect long-term success, but it will also significantly increase costs and time consumption. 

8. Forget micromanaging 

As a business owner, you can control everything but forget about trying to control your employees. The more you try to control someone, the more they’ll run away from you. So for your company to be successful, it’s important to allow employees to have ownership of their tasks. 

Anytime employees feel forced to ask managers about small tasks, it can lead to lower productivity. Maybe they feel as if they’ll be criticized for their suggestions, which might be a problem in discussing other ideas. This way, not only will employees run away from discussing new ideas, they’ll be convinced that the manager only wants things to go their way. 

71% of employees said micromanagement had affected their job performance. Based on these statistics, the human resource industry has made drastic improvements to the way they are managing their teams and are reducing micromanagement since it has a negative impact on their performance. 

The reason productivity matters 

Productivity is the backbone of a successful business. However, productivity depends on many factors, one of which is how the higher powers manage the business. This directly impacts turnover rates, productivity levels in the business and how employees feel in the long term. 

After all, the most important thing is to make everyone feel good because each employee will affect the other. Most importantly, the higher powers in the company are the ones who have the most effect on performance. The second you realize something is wrong with your productivity, you need to start monitoring who or what the issue is. 

About the author: 

Tony Ademi is a freelance SEO content and copywriter. He has been in the writing industry for three years and has managed to write hundreds of SEO-optimized articles. Moreover, he has written articles that have ranked #1 on Google. Tony’s primary concern when writing an article is to do extensive research and ensure that the reader is engaged until the end.