How To Improve Your Team's Productivity

Hello and welcome to episode 182 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This podcast and many others tend to focus on the individual rather than the group and this is likely because changing an individual’s habits can be easier than trying to change a group’s habits. But that does not mean changing the way a group operates is impossible. With leadership and a commitment from the group as a whole, significant positive changes can be made and very quickly.

So that is what I shall be addressing this week.

Now, before we dive into the answer, I’d like to urge you to download a copy of my free Areas of Focus workbook. The cornerstone of all effective time management and productivity systems is knowing what is important to you. If you do not know what is important to you, you will soon find yourself serving the interests of other people and their interests are never going to be fulfilling to you.

Once you know what is important, you can then build these areas of your life into your daily, weekly, and monthly tasks ensuring that you are bringing balance into your life. Time spent on your relationships and family, your career, your health, wealth, experiences and overall purpose are a lot more important than most people realise. That balance gives you the sense of freedom and wellbeing that so many people lack in their lives today.

The download is free and I will not be asking you for your email address or any personal information. I just want you to discover what is important to you so you can build your life around what you want, and not what other people want.

So if you have not done so already, head over to my downloads page on my website—carlpullein.com and start working your way through it.

Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question:

This week’s question comes from Mark. Mark asks, Hi Carl, I manage a team of sixteen people and we are all struggling to stay on top of the work handed down to us from head office. There’s a mixture of customer support, admin tasks and sales and it is just piling up and we don’t seem to be getting anywhere close to clearing our backlog. Do you have any productivity tips for teams that might help?

Hi Mark, thank you for your question and for reminding me that productivity is not only about the individual, but also about the team.

To answer your question directly, yes there are and there are quite a lot of them.

First up we need to deal with communication. How does your team communicate with each other? With the seismic changes in the way we work that has happened over the last year, one of the key areas that have a profound impact on a team’s productivity is in the way the team communicates.

One of the issues I’ve come across numerous times is the number of channels a team can communicate. There is the phone, email and instant messaging of course, but over the last twelve months, there have been additional channels added. Slack, Microsoft Teams and even messaging within project management software such as Salesforce and Trello.

That’s a lot of communication channels a team member needs to navigate and with so many channels to check there is going to be a time cost and a risk of something important being missed.

A leader of a team needs to designate one channel for team communication. Ideally, this channel should be a purpose-built channel. By that I mean, if you are using an app like Trello or Google Docs, while they do have a way to add comments and messages to documents or tasks, these tools were not designed to be a complete solution for communicating.

Instead, you would be better served if you designated one purpose-built communication tool for all your team’s communications. Apps like Microsoft Teams, Twist or Slack have been developed for teams to work together and they have the added benefit for team leaders to see what’s going on without the need to be constantly interrupting team members asking for updates.

Within these apps, you can create various channels, so in your case, Mark, you could have a separate channel for customer support, sales and admin as well as any other area your team is responsible for.

This way you and your team can quickly see what’s going on, ask questions and assign responsibility for the different tasks that can be involved.

With these apps, Teams, Twist and Slack, you can add on your favourite task manager as an extension. For instance, if you use Todoist, you can get the Todoist add on for Teams and Slack so any task that is assigned to you, you can quickly add it to your own to-do list. And as Twist is made by the people who develop Todoist, their integration is excellent.

Next up is ownership. One reason why so many tasks and issues within a team fall between the cracks—so to speak—is because no one has taken ownership of the problem.

While modern technology does help us to get more work done more effectively, it only works if the people using the technology take responsibility for what goes in it. So, if there is a customer with a problem, then someone in your team needs to take responsibility for that customer.

I’ve been on the receiving end of a customer support team that has no such responsibility, so each time I communicate with the team I get a different person who is using the same script as the one before. Now not only does support management by computer input damage the relationship with the customer (we are humans we like to work with other humans and not machines) it also leaves your customer support team feeling unfulfilled because they get no sense of accomplishment if all they are doing is picking up where someone else left off and then passing the problem on to the next person in the shift.

Give someone responsibility for each task—whether that is a customer support issue, a sales lead or some admin task that needs doing for head office. That way there is ownership and accountability and your team will be much better engaged in the process and their work.

Next up is meetings. Meetings are the antipathy of productivity because while you are holding a meeting nothing is getting done. Sure, decisions may be made, but more often than not, a team with good leadership will always have excellent decision-making processes anyway.

And while decisions are being made, you will often find no one is willing to take responsibility to see that the decision is carried through.

Now, while I do accept a limited number of meetings are unavoidable, they should be kept to a minimum. Each decision made in a meeting must be given a DRI—a Designated Responsible Individual to see through the decision and make sure whatever needs to happen happens within the allotted time. That way you have accountability and your team are empowered to make sure the work gets done.

And while on the subject of meetings, meetings should be limited to thirty minutes. There are two very good reasons for this too.

If you hold thirty-minute meetings these things will happen immediately. First, people will always arrive on time. One of the reasons you get people joining meetings a few minutes late is because with a typical hour-long meeting there is an expectation of small talk at the beginning. So there’s less sense of importance for the first five or ten minutes.

In thirty minute meetings, people sense that the meeting will start on time and get straight to the point.

Secondly, because the time is limited, people get to the point much faster. There’s little digression, and things stay on point.

You should always have an agenda and make sure people get that agenda at least 24 hours before the meeting so they have time to prepare. And if, as the leader, you discover someone in your team did not prepare, call them out for their lack of preparation. You will only need to do this a few times before your team soon learn they must prepare.

Whenever I talk with individuals about their time management troubles, the most common reason for backlog and overwhelm is not the volume of work they have but the number of meetings they are expected to attend. So reducing the number of meetings you hold just makes sense from a productivity point of view

If you want to improve your team’s productivity make all meetings voluntary. When you do this two things will happen.

Firstly, you give greater flexibility to your team to make judgments on whether they can or should attend a meeting. Trust that your team know whether they could contribute something significant to the meeting or not. If they feel they cannot, then allow them the flexibility to decline the meeting invitation.

Secondly, and more importantly, you make the meeting organiser accountable for the content of the meeting. If a meeting organiser frequently runs disorganised and ineffective meetings, people will stop attending their meetings. This will put pressure on them to improve the way they hold their meetings or better yet, stop holding meetings.

This is similar to me writing a blog post on a specific topic and find I don’t get any readers. That tells me the topic has no interest and I need to change the topic or make the writing more compelling. I am forced to improve either way. The same happens once you make all meetings voluntary. The quality of your meetings will improve significantly.

Finally, implement the Time Sector System. While I create the Time Sector System for individuals, it works brilliantly for small teams. Our work and priorities are moving incredibly fast these days. What might be a priority today could easily become obsolescent next week. The idea behind the Time Sector System is you focus on the work that needs to be done this week.

Now what I am about to say will seem counter to what I said about meetings, but there are two meetings a leader should have each week. The first meeting is held on a Monday where the team decides what needs to be accomplished this week. When you get agreement on this by the team and everyone is clear about what must happen to accomplish those goals and what their tasks are that will help accomplish those goals your team will be hyper-focused on getting their important tasks completed.

The second meeting is held on a Friday, where your team report on their progress and discuss any issues or delays and what needs to be carried forward to the following week.

The purpose here is to be clear about the work that needs to be completed that week. New inputs can be discussed in either meeting and decisions made about when these tasks should be done—this week, next week, this month, next month or longer term.

Using this method, the team leader needs to have a place where the team’s overall objectives for the quarter and the year are and what needs to be done and when in order to achieve these. To ensure all team members know what the overall purpose and objectives are, a shared Kanban board can help. Applications such as Trello, Asana or Meistertask are all great tools that can do this job well and responsibility for each project can be assigned to team members.

Again, as with tools such as Microsoft Teams, Slack or Twist, the team leader can see instantly where a project is and what still needs to be done so there is less following up, and a lot more doing going on.

So there you go, Mark, those are the ways a team can dramatically improve its overall productivity. It begins with accountability and ownership. If nobody owns the task and is not directly responsible for it, then backlogs will develop.

If communication channels are all over the place, things will inevitably get missed, so make sure you and your team agree on one single communication channel.

And restrict the number of meetings and trust that your team know what they are doing and leave them to get on with doing it. Work gets done when people have the time and space to do the work, not when they are in and out of meetings all day satisfying a manager’s need to micro-manage.

I hope that has helped, you Mark and thank you so much for your question. And thank you to you for listening.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.