Address Team Productivity Issues With These Best Management Practices

David Allen, the author of the famous book Getting It Done, discovered something after coaching hundreds of companies and thousands of workers: everyone can tweak their own productivity, but all that effort can be minimized if their coworkers aren’t pulling their weight. It led to a second book: Getting things done… with others. Lowered team productivity can drag down even the highest performers, and it’s actually easy to solve with better management.

According to Allen, team productivity problems typically arise from poor management. In the tech industry, for example, many programmers were promoted because they were good programmers but knew nothing about managing people. Promotions should also be based on people skills or include management training. 

Someone promoted because they are a rockstar at their job does not necessarily make a rockstar manager. They may expect everyone to perform to their level, which is not always the case. They may not be good mentors or listeners, and they may prefer the heads-down approach to work. But pitfalls don’t just arise with new managers, any manager can benefit from implementing best management practices to increase team productivity. 

In any workplace, there are a few top performers, a bunch of average performers, and a few low-level performers. A good manager actively engages with trying to help the average and low-level people level up, accommodating their work styles within reason, and keeping the higher performers happy. 

Here are some things you can do to increase your team’s productivity and flex your management skills. 

1. Have a Clear, Transparent Solution for Tackling Tasks

We’ve all been the recipient of that email asking for something to be done where the sender doesn’t identify who they want to do the task or when it’s needed. Then, that task doesn’t get done, or the people being emailed frantically message each other to see who will take on the responsibility. 

All this delays the start of the project and leaves people frustrated. If you are assigning a project, you need to assign the work clearly—to specific people with a clear deadline—and then assign one point person to review the work, from either the client, management, or both sides. 

Ambiguous task assignment creates confusion and lessens team cohesion. Other than creating frustration, it can also cause people to fight over who owns what and what they can and cannot take on. In the same way, too many “cooks in the kitchen” reviewing work leads to slowdowns, as well as conflicting viewpoints, which also ends up delaying the end result and leaving people feeling deflated. 

Too many managers make the mistake of dumping all of the work on the superstars to ensure it gets done and gets done well, mitigating any risk from assigning to the lower-level performers. This unfairness creates a lack of cohesion in the team, which can lead to the lower-level performers being bullied or shunned by their coworkers, and high performers feeling burnt out.

2. Put Together a Plan for Collaboration

One of the biggest arguments for in-office work is increased collaboration. It is vital to identify what counts as collaboration and what is actually a distraction. Team socializing is great for building cohesion, but the extroverts on your team may need to reign it in a little to avoid distracting others and to get their own work done. Identify what you consider to be socializing and what you consider to be collaboration, and encourage those who want to socialize to do it outside of work hours. 

Managers should come up with a formalized timetable for collaborative efforts and standards for what does and what does not require a meeting. Limiting meetings greatly improves productivity by giving everyone the time they need to do deep work. A formalized timetable for collaboration may look like Brenda and David carving out some time to work on projects together once a week, or project meetings once every two weeks to track progress and answer questions that can wait. The ultimate goal is to increase time for focused deep work. 

It is well established that unnecessary meetings kill overall productivity. Follow our tips here for reducing them as much as possible.

3. Address Below-Average Performers With Standards

A manager should have the attitude that everyone is teachable. Lower performing staff may just not have the necessary training and guidance that they need to succeed. Retraining new hires can cost the company tens of thousands of dollars, so it is worth working with them rather than laying them off. 

Come up with standards for work that each team member is expected to meet or exceed, and enforce a performance improvement plan for the people who aren’t meeting the standards. This holds the lower-level performers accountable and relieves the burden they are placing on other members of the team. While they are on their plan, don’t assign them any mission-critical tasks, but rather support work that helps the rest of the team focus on more important things. 

Doing a better job of overall time management, project management, and addressing team weaknesses will go a long way towards raising team productivity. To measure both team and individual productivity, have a look at our employee productivity management solution, Prodoscore. With it, you can visualize productivity at the individual, team, and overall organizational levels.