Survey Shows 5 Ways to Improve Team Productivity Today

by Joe Staples Nov 03, 2016

The article source is here.

Imagine you’re on Family Feud, but with a team of work colleagues instead of relatives. The host Steve Harvey (or Richard Dawson, for those who haven’t seen an episode since 1984) poses the first question:

“Okay, top 5 answers are on the board. We surveyed 606 enterprise workers and asked them: what is the best way to improve team productivity?”

You hit the buzzer first, and say…

Well, what would you say? Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you guess. I’ll just tell you. After studying the results of this year’s U.S. State of Enterprise Work Report, I pulled out the five most important takeaways that will help organizations improve individual and team productivity.

1. Let people work when they work best

More than a third of workers (35%) report being most productive before normal business hours. Another 38% say they’re most productive between 9 and 11 a.m. The least productive time slot? Between 3-5 p.m.

What does that tell you? You could greatly benefit from embracing the growing trend of flex hours. After all, it’s results that matter, not physical presence in the cubicle farm from 8-5 daily. If you have employees who love getting up at 5 and cranking through a bunch of work, taking a longer lunch, and heading home at 3, let them. You’ll get their best effort, and they’ll experience greater satisfaction at work.

Another tip? Avoid scheduling lengthy meetings before 11 a.m.—apart from a 15-minute standup of course. Do you really want to spend the most engaged and productive hours of 73% of your employees sitting around a conference room table?

2. Encourage uninterrupted blocks of time

When we asked enterprise workers what would do the most to improve their work productivity, the top answer was: uninterrupted blocks of time.

This can be accomplished in a number of ways:

• Block out sections of the calendar that are always meeting free for the entire team—like from 9 to 11 a.m., for example.
• Encourage individual employees to block out their calendars for 3-4 hours at a time a couple of days a week. Make those uninterrupted hours sacred. This includes turning off all notifications from all software applications—both on the desktop and the smartphone.
• Set aside a conference room or an office with a door that your team members can schedule for solo, silent work time.
• Allow team members to work remotely more often. Slack, Hipchat, Workfront, Trello, and any other online collaboration tool you may be using work just as well from the coffee shop down the street—or from your employee’s living room.
• Use the resource scheduling capabilities built into your work management software solution to make sure you’re not overloading anyone at any given time. All the uninterrupted time in the world won’t solve the problem of too much work for too few employees.

3. Eliminate your biggest distraction: unnecessary meetings

When asked what gets in the way of their work, 59% of workers blamed “wasteful meetings,” making it the number one answer by far.

Getting rid of unwanted meetings may be easier than you think. I recently wrote an entire article that explains how to reduce your meeting load by 50%. The gist is this: if project status is easily shareable and discoverable within a project management software solution, you can all but eliminate the status meeting.

The same goes for digital proofing. With the right solution in place, you’ll never again have to assemble the team to discuss conflicting feedback on the latest rounds of comps that have been circulating. As one creative director recently said:

“[With digital proofing], we’ve been able to speed up our approval process by at least a third and enable our designers and writers to do what they do best, which is designing and writing, instead of tracking down questions and holding extra meetings trying to get stakeholders to weigh in.”

4. Curtail your second biggest distraction: email

Almost half of workers (43%) blame excessive emails for getting in the way of their work. Email will never go away entirely, but 27% of those surveyed are clinging to the desperate hope that “email will no longer be a main mode of communication in 5 years.” And who can blame them?

Email is often used for purposes it wasn’t designed for. Here are a few ways to limit the time your team has to spend on email:

• Don’t use email as a to-do list. Instead, use task tracking software, or comprehensive project management solutions that include much more robust features, like notifications and collaboration capabilities.
• Don’t use email to communicate project status. Questions and comments that are related to a specific project should ideally be posed and answered from within a project management solution. The right software makes it easy to communicate status with a touch of a button: “going smoothly,” “some concerns” or “major roadblocks,” for example.
• Don’t use email for quick, throw-away questions. Not every conversation needs to be archived and backed up by your email server or your work management solution. Use Google chat, Slack, HipChat and similar tools for quick questions (“Who’s that new vendor Dave mentioned this morning?”) and instant reminders (“Hey, will you respond to my question in Workfront about those banner specs before the end of the day?”).
• Don’t play email ping pong when scheduling a meeting time. Use Doodle instead to accomplish the same thing in just 2 steps, no matter how many people you’re inviting. It radically simplifies the process of scheduling events, especially when your attendees are using different calendaring systems.

5. Make your work processes more efficient

Workers claim that, after uninterrupted blocks of time, the second most important step in improving their work productivity would be: “more efficient work processes.” A bit further down on the list was “advanced technology.” To their credit, these respondents got the sequencing right.

It’s tempting to think that just by plugging in the right kind of time management or project management software, all of your problems will be solved overnight. It’s not quite so simple.

In a Harvard Business Review article, Maura Thomas argues that productivity tools are useless without productivity skills.

“Most companies roll out software with only technical training, intending for that software to improve efficiency and ultimately, productivity. There’s instruction on the various menus, and where to click to achieve certain tasks. This training only serves to make employees proficient in the software, but not necessarily more productive. Thus the new software often isn’t used, or if it is, it doesn’t solve the problem. … A better approach is to focus first on the methodology before the tool itself. When you have the methodology, the requirements for the tool become apparent.”

It’s like buying new golf clubs and expecting to immediately have the result be a hole in one. Luckily, any productivity software worth its salt will include personalized consulting services to help customize it to your team’s particular needs.

After onboarding Workfront as their new work-management solution, Erin Frey, Creative Director at House of Blues, said:

“The minute our consultant arrived, … he asked me questions about our workflow. He didn’t just figure out how things would work in [the software], but figured out if we were using the most efficient workflow, period.”

And the Survey Says…

Not only are you prepared if anyone starts a workplace version of Family Feud and asks you the all-important productivity question, but now you also have a few tricks up your sleeve to solve your team members’ biggest complaints at work—from embracing flex schedules and uninterrupted blocks of time to cutting back on wasteful meetings and emails.