Tremendous productivity: 5 ways to increase team productivity

In this article, The Productivity Pro founder, Laura Stack, will tell you how managers can increase personal and team productivity .

The best advice I have ever received was given to me by a man whom I had never met, and he had not seen me. It was Peter Drucker. While studying at university, I read his works, there is my favorite quote: “There is nothing more useless than productively doing what you don’t need to do at all.” Or again: "Productivity is the ability to do things right, and efficiency is the ability to do the right things." Drucker and many others believe that there is a difference between these two terms. In general, they can be given the following definitions:
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Efficiency , or the ability to do the right thing, usually refers to successfully obtaining the expected and desired result. It characterizes the extent to which the goal is achieved, the problem is solved and the profit is obtained. Anyone with the right training or good instruction can do the right thing. An appropriately programmed robot will cope with this. Efficiency alone is not enough to recognize a good leader.

Productivity , or the ability to do things right, is the execution of work with minimal time, effort and money. This is the shortest distance between the goal setting and the mark on its implementation. The "productivity" of a business significantly reduces the amount of resources needed to perform the work. Productivity takes into account the real situation, but finds a way to tilt it in its favor.

Today, after nearly 25 years of lecturing and writing articles on productivity, I began to believe that productivity in business should include efficiency. Productivity without efficiency can have a devastating effect. No matter how well your team is climbing Everest, if you were going to climb Mont Blanc. And when a mechanic replaces a punched tire on your car, it does not matter how productively he does it, the tire is still damaged. It turns out that, in fact, we want to get effective productivity.

You, as a manager, really want to improve the performance of your team and yourself. This requires effective productivity. Efficiency without productivity is often unproductive. Therefore, good leaders combine these two characteristics to improve the productivity and profitability of their teams. Here are some examples of how this is done.

1. Use technology.

A technological breakthrough in the past century has greatly facilitated the ability to perform more tasks in less time. Therefore, be susceptible to emerging trends, devices and programs, encourage their use. Allow your employees to bring and use their own devices for work. Why not use a source of productivity gains that you don’t need to pay for? If they want to be able to check work email in their free time, not only let them do it, but help. (We recommend reading a useful article about 5 new mobile applications that increase your performance )

2. Provide instant access to work information from anywhere.

Team members can work from almost anywhere where there is WiFi. If possible, let them do it. When my office manager has a child, I let her work from home on this day. It's pretty simple, and allows it to maintain performance to some degree. The desire of your employees to work remotely should also be encouraged. Using WiFi, Evernote and other nice applications, you can always be in touch. Workers can always access work information, wherever they are: at home, in a hotel, at a conference, in a dining room, etc. Provide them with a reliable, secure way to share ideas and interact, let them be more flexible and able to respond quickly.

3. Measure everything.

You can better influence the situation when you understand it through numbers. Keep track of all the indicators that are relevant to your team - from the number of hours worked and the reports to the performance per hour of working time. Use a reporting system, project management software, SharePoint, Google Docs sharing tables, an Outlook Scheduler, or just a whiteboard for recording important team indicators. You can use ready-made programs or order your own development.

4. Get brainstormed regularly.

Periodically meet with your team to share ideas on how best to achieve strategic priorities and improve processes and procedures. Look for intersecting areas and eliminate redundancy. Constantly discuss that what your employees are doing does not add value to the company. Eliminate operations that become unnecessary after changing platforms. Ensure that each employee maintains complete documentation so that the new employee can quickly get up to date. Do not filter your thoughts, let your ideas cross-pollinate, giving interesting hybrid fruits. Consider ideas from other industries and apply them to yours - remember that bank terminals inspired McDonald's to create the service “Drive through”.

5. Set performance targets and track their performance.

After coordinating ideas with your team and setting goals , make a special schedule for achieving them. As in any project, break such goals into small, easily manageable parts, each of which has its own indicators and deadlines. After the goal is reached, install a new one.

These five benchmarks will create a sufficient basis for the implementation and support of initiatives to achieve effective productivity. Always remember that in business, productivity is not just speed. If she lacks efficiency, she is useless, whatever the speed of execution.

PS We recommend another article on the topic - To become a leader for others, first become a leader for yourself.

Translated by Vyacheslav Davidenko, founder of MBA Consult