Top Strategies to Boost Team Productivity: 11 Essential Tips to Follow

Successful team productivity can strongly impact your organization and productive teams can make much fewer mistakes and create more high-quality work, increasing job satisfaction, and improving the customer experience. 

Productivity isn’t always about producing more work; it's about providing employees with the resources they need to do their best work and feeling motivated to do so. 

In this article, we’ll explore how following these tips can increase team productivity. 

1. Get rid of unnecessary meetings 

You’d be surprised how much unnecessary meetings are hurting team productivity. Let’s be honest: Meetings rarely last for a few minutes and, often, can go up to hours since you get lost in a discussion. However, this isn’t a good practice as it consumes unnecessary time from both ends. 

Recent research shows that around 24 billion hours are lost each year by companies due to unproductive meetings. Meetings can be productive, but they are important and should only be held when necessary. Some managers might try to “save” time with short meetings, but this isn’t a good practice either. Instead, it’s best to ask your team when they need a meeting and what they need to discuss. 

2. Define your team goals 

Sharing goals with your team is an important way on how you can improve team collaboration and build a good team rapport. Some great idea of what kind of team goals you can set include: 

1. Reducing response time 
2. Gathering more feedback from customers 
3. Improving team collaboration 

By any chance, if you think it might be difficult to define your team’s goals, you can try using planning templates. These help businesses identify what their current team strengths and weaknesses are and improve the decision making process. 

3. Put low-priority work last 

You’d be surprised how much low-priority work wastes time. Without an effective system in place, work efficiency can easily suffer from a lack of productivity. You can easily improve your team’s efficiency at work and improve workplace happiness by including good workload management. 

The best way to effectively manage your workload is to delegate or diminish low-priority tasks. Take a look at the bigger picture of your project and see what needs to be done through a needs assessment, which shows which tasks should be prioritized first. You can do this by following these rules: 

1. If your task isn’t heading towards the company’s goal, it’s best to delegate it;
2. Complete tasks that have a great impact on company goals and complete the ones that have less of an impact later on;
3. Always try to find team members who are more focused on low-priority tasks. 

Workload management is important for effectively managing and distributing work across your team. To effectively get started with workload management, you should initially collect more insights about your team’s workload. 

4. Leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools 

With AI tools rising in the digital market, it’s becoming more important than ever to take advantage of them and check out how they can help you become more productive. You can leverage AI tools to increase team productivity in the following ways: 

1. Automating routine tasks: One of AI’s biggest advantages is to handle all repetitive tasks. This includes scheduling meetings, managing emails, dealing with customer inquiries, and more. Administrative work can take lots of time from you, but the most important part is to not waste too much time on it. This allows team members to focus more on strategic tasks that require more effort from your side. 
2. Project management features: AI tools are capable of leveraging Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to manage workloads and eliminate any roadblocks that are reducing team productivity. These insights help project managers balance workloads and improve the decision-making process.
3. Improving data-driven decisions: AI is great at analyzing large sets of data in a short period of time, uncovering trends, and generating necessary insights that will help you and your team make productive decisions. Data-driven approaches reduce guesswork and increase the effectiveness of your decisions. 
4. Time management: AI tools can track productivity patterns by providing you with in-depth details of how your time is spent. These features allow team members to stay focused and productive, allowing managers to use these insights for providing realistic goals and effectively managing time. 

AI tools are revolutionizing team productivity by saving team members time from repetitive tasks and improving the decision-making process. 

5. Promote work autonomy 

Giving independence to all team members is a great way to allow them to be productive. Research conducted by Harvard shows that 77% claimed they would work for companies that offer them more autonomy at work compared to those that give them a fixed schedule. 

This also impacts productivity and managers can do a good thing by offering employees a flexible schedule and allowing them to independently manage their resources and limit interruptions. Each person is productive at different times, so it’s important to allow each team member to adapt to their preferred work schedule. 

Therefore, you can simply ask your team members to take the initiative to set up their own time schedule and propose solutions. These steps will not only help build up their confidence, but allow them to become more independent and productive. 

6. Leverage team member strengths 

If you focus on weaknesses, you’ll have weaknesses, but if you focus on your strengths, you’ll get the productivity levels you want. Each person goes through different experiences, weaknesses, and strengths that makes team members feel valued. 

Not everyone has the same preferences and the truth is that different people enjoy different work. For instance, one person on your team might enjoy organizing and conducting research into your report, while a different teammate will enjoy some other activity. 

Knowing what your team members are good at, and what their weaknesses are helps you find out how they are spending their time at work, and what they enjoy doing most. This helps you leverage their strengths and will positively contribute to the productivity of the team. 

7. Offer development and training opportunities 

Offering training and development opportunities is excellent for keeping teams challenged and satisfied. Supporting employee growth is beneficial and let’s be honest, it’s a much more expensive option to hire a new employee instead of sticking to the old ones. In fact, making a new hire can cost companies up to three or four times a regular employee's salary! 

All employees want progress in their career and the best way to do so is by offering them development opportunities, which also helps in boosting employee engagement and creating a much stronger and more efficient team. 

8. Always provide regular feedback 

Most employees don’t like micromanagement and the truth is that feedback is important. While regular meetings are important, it’s essential to mention where employees can make improvements to increase their productivity levels. 

Feedback is important if you want progress in a company, and it should go both ways. Employees should also give you feedback on where the company can make improvements.

9. Encourage open communication 

It’s always important to foster a culture where team members can comfortably share updates and concerns they have. You can communicate with your team through different communication channels, which can either be through social media, Slack, email, or any other platform that you are using. 

Open communication can be organized in several ways: 

1. Choosing a channel where you and your team communicate
2. Encouraging one-on-one meetings from time to time
3. Clarify all roles and responsibilities that each team member has
4. Celebrate open communication success

Encouraging open communication fosters a winning company culture and earns mutual respect from both sides. This is not only important for sharing ideas, but making sure to solve problems together. 

10. Encourage regular team breaks and avoid employee burnout 

Employee burnout is very common amongst many workplaces around the world. Gallup’s burnout report claims that 76% of employees experience burnout. Employees who suffer burnout will most likely try to avoid tasks as much as possible and take unnecessary day-offs. Also, they are 2.6 times more likely to find a new job and leave their current one. 

Statistics say a lot, and it’s your turn to not let this happen. While machines might never get tired, humans do. You should encourage short breaks throughout work days and even days off throughout the year. 

Some companies will do trips together with their team to make sure everyone deepens their relationship with each other and better structure their collaboration strategies. 

11. Set realistic approaches with your workload 

This is a common mistake amongst many business owners. It is about facing schedule overload. This means when too many tasks are assigned to employees to a point where they burnout and become overly stressed. 

This isn’t something you want to happen and the worst part is that some employees might even slow down and start to be less productive. Realistic workloads help employees make less mistakes and give them more room for improving their output. 

Team productivity matters a lot for long-term success

Team productivity is important and the higher it’s, the more it’ll impact your long-term business success. Especially in today’s competitive landscape, fostering a collaborative team space, setting clear goals, and using AI tools to your advantage will encourage each team member to give their best. 

When teams are encouraged to work effectively, they can achieve great outcomes, and allow the business to invest in more important strategies that will influence its long-term success.