The role of a leader in the workplace is to get the best out of every employee. Ensuring your workers reach their full potential enables your organization to realize its short and long-term goals. For any organization to achieve optimum production efficiency, all employees should work together in harmony.
With some great suggestions from our regional sales manager, Debbie Simpson, here are several tricks you can use for improving team performance among your employees.
Tips for Improving Team Performance
1. Specify Every Person’s role
All the employees of your company should know their duties and boundaries in the institution’s operations. Without duty specification, many tasks will remain undone. Ensure you hire and assign the required number of employees per task to ensure no overlap between duties.
2. Foster Effective Communication
Once all your employees understand their roles, it is up to you to facilitate regular and effective communication between them. Without communication, your team members will not understand their responsibilities, and the business may fail. Consider having a digital platform specific to your company’s team members where everyone can share project progress, challenges, and ideas in real-time.
Debbie says, “I’m a big believer in staying in communication with your team. Of course, communicate through emails and Zoom calls, but also have someone in-person on property, at the office, or wherever your organization is, as your point of contact. This is especially important in the age of remote work.”
3. Conduct Regular Meetings
Although technology advancements allow you to host virtual meetings, meeting your team members in person often helps you and your employees to foster tighter bonds. Face-to-face meetings invoke more participation from the team. It also allows you a stronger non-verbal understanding of your team members, which helps you build stronger connections within your workforce.
Regular meetings will help resolve disagreements quicker than conversing through phone calls or emails. Your team members are more likely to pay attention to each other during meetings, thus, empowering their relationship in the office.
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4. Promote Diversity within the Team
Inclusivity and diversity can create a lot of advantages for your employees. Most managers think of diversity on gender and racial basis alone. However, there is more to diversity than race and sexual orientation. Strive to have employees from different cultural, economic, and academic backgrounds. Inclusivity among colleagues ensures your company constantly has ideas that are considerate of people from all backgrounds. Also, consider inclusivity for persons with disabilities.
Here are a few ways you can promote diversity within your team.
- Start highlighting diversity from the recruitment stage of your company. Remove any form of bias from the career page of your website and conduct interviews with candidates from all backgrounds.
- Conduct regular diversity training and workshops to remind your employees of the benefits of inclusivity.
- Construct gender-neutral bathrooms and handicap-able facilities like ramps to make the office space wheelchair accessible for disabled employees.
- Offer rewards to employees for diverse client referrals.
5. Team Building Sessions
Another way of improving team productivity is to conduct regular team-building exercises. Most successful companies have team-building exercises after three months. Set aside one day for your employees to retreat and bond with each other. Spending time away from the workplace will facilitate informal communication between them.
RELATED: Build Your Dream Team: Worthwhile Team Building Exercises in Blacksburg
6. Facilitate Structure Within the Workplace
With so many folks working remotely, it’s crucial for a manager to facilitate structure. Just because you can email your team at 3:00 am, doesn’t mean you should!
Here are a few ways to do this:
- If your team members work from home, give them the tools to succeed. Whether specific equipment to set up their home office or a stipend to buy office supplies, ensure they have what they need to do their job well.
- Encourage your team to time block their day. That means they should have specific periods allocated for certain tasks. This will help to improve productivity as well as work/life balance.
- Set working hours and stick to them.
“Having a structure for the day is a great way to increase productivity.” Debbie says, “I typically start my day returning emails and phone calls; then, I have a big chunk of time dedicated to sales calls and outreach, then I spend the last part of the day doing paperwork.”
7. Show Gratitude to your Team Members
Gratitude has been scientifically shown to increase productivity. A study published in the journal Applied Psychology found that expressing gratitude at work can lead to employee benefits, including increased production, better job satisfaction, and less burnout.
Offer rewards to your employees for completing jobs successfully. Rewards may be monetary or other tokens of appreciation. You can pay for vacations, offer gift vouchers, and promotions.
Even a simple “thank you” goes a long way in boosting employee morale and, as a result, productivity.
So, take the time to show your team members how much you appreciate their hard work.
8. Encourage Ownership
When employees feel they have a stake in the company, they are more likely to work harder to achieve its goals.
Make your employees feel like they own the company by giving them space to make decisions.
Encourage creativity and innovation within the workplace by allowing your team members to come up with new ideas.
Giving your employees ownership will also help you retain them for longer. They will feel like they are truly a part of the organization’s overall success.
“I always feel that everyone should take ownership of their position,” Debbie says, “because it makes them feel empowered. And when they’re in power, they have pride in their work. And that is what leads to productivity.”
9. Empower Your Team to Provide Feedback
Encourage your employees to give feedback about their work environment, job satisfaction, and areas where they think the company can improve. Employees appreciate being heard, and it shows that you value their opinions.
You can collect feedback by conducting regular surveys or holding one-on-one meetings with employees. Make sure you act on the feedback you receive to show your employees that you are serious about making improvements.
As a leader, you need your team to work in unison toward a common goal for the organization to succeed. Regardless of how small or big your team is, leading it requires a lot of effort. You can use the tips mentioned above to draw your team members closer to each other and accelerate their ultimate productivity.
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