As remote and hybrid work becomes the new normal, business leaders are increasingly focused on ways to ensure teams stay connected and high-performing even when you’re not meeting regularly at the office.
Here’s 5 ways to help improve the performance (and morale!) of your teams in 2023.
Establish a Single, Streamlined Communications Platform
One of the most useful ways to improve team performance is to boost team communication and collaboration. In 2023, that means using effective communications technologies. In a time when we’re using chat, video calls, emails, and collaborative documents on a daily basis, one of the ways to streamline communication and improve productivity is to use an integrated platform. Spike team chat is one of the most robust of these integrated apps. With Spike, you’ll have email, calendar, group chat, video chat, collaborative documents, tasks and to-dos in a single user-friendly platform. You can use Spike’s powerful proprietary email client or connect existing business emails such as Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, and more.
Establish a Single Depository of Documents
Just as it’s ideal to have a single streamlined communication platform, you’ll also need to have a single depository of documents that provides all the information your team members need to successfully execute their responsibilities. Do you have a place that team members can go to for accurate, updated information on every project or initiative? This is also essential from a best practices perspective, ensuring each team member knows what has worked and what has failed, in order to consistently optimize on the strategy that has been tried and tested so far.
Clarify Each Person’s Role
One of the most essential steps in increasing team productivity is reducing redundancy and overlap. To do so, its critical team members are clear on their roles and responsibilities, as well as their unique skills to add value to the organization. Ensure each individual knows their top priority for the day, the key projects they are focusing on, and the clearly documented outcomes their success is measured by. Make sure to meet with your team members one-on-one to communicate these priorities and expectations. But don’t micromanage. Describe the required outcome and success metrics, and then allow them leeway to achieve these goals and make decisions. Empower your employees to make decisions about responsibilities they can delegate, or which meetings they need to attend and which they can skip.
Cut down on Unnecessary Meetings
On the subject of meetings, a great way of improving productivity is to reduce unnecessary meetings and allow employees more time actually to do – rather than just discuss – their tasks. We’re all familiar with lengthy and boring meetings, where one person just drones on and everyone else just wants to get back to work. As a leader, you’ll need to set an example. When you find yourself considering a full team meeting, ask yourself if it could instead be an email or quick phone call. If a meeting is necessary, make sure you’re not the one that’s droning on. If another colleague tends to be particularly long winded, as a leader you should step in to take control of the room. You can gently mention that the point could best be discussed in another channel, and redirect the conversation. For any meetings that are truly necessary, ensure there is an agenda, meeting minutes, action items, task owners and timelines to each point.
Prioritize and Cut Back on Low Impact Initiatives
In an ideal world, you’d execute every brilliant idea you’ve had for your business, grant a go ahead for every project requested by your team, and add all the feature-laden business applications you dream about. But in the real world, you’ve got to prioritize – mercilessly. As a leader, you need to constantly analyze the gap between what your team is doing, and what would add the most value. Outline key goals and analyze your team’s capacity to execute on them. This will help you decide what people should be working on and what they should best avoid. Also be explicit about how much time you expect people to devote to key aspects of their role. Often, that means cutting projects to make room for something more impactful ensuring your team isn’t wasting their energy and productivity on low-impact initiatives. Cutting projects that are not working is often a tough decision, but that’s why prioritization needs to be merciless. Make sure that at any given time, each department, team, and individual knows their number one strategic priority.