Small business owners know very well how much they depend on their team. If the team is not efficient, their business fails, and they will gradually lose customers. The trend of a team is important because it makes clear what priorities need to be set and what tasks need to be completed to sustain the team's efficiency. Team efficiency starts with actively listening to your team’s needs. From there, you can determine where you can most effectively streamline your team’s workflow, optimize your team’s performance and create a culture of efficiency. But, how do you improve team efficiency?
If you want to improve your team’s efficiency, use the following nine tips to guide your process:
- Eliminate any unnecessary meetings.
When you meet with people in large groups, small groups, and one on one, it’s easy to let the non-essential meeting requests pile up. In the name of “being productive,” many meetings are organized with no clear goal or outcome, and some are actually for the explicit purpose of checking in. No one seems to be able to manage their time effectively in these situations, so there’s a real need to abolish unnecessary meetings in order to make a meaningful difference. Instead, try asking yourself if this is something that can be accomplished through a phone call or email. If a face-to-face meeting is actually needed, consider whether it makes more sense to schedule it for another time. This will give everyone a chance to be present and prepared for the conversation without having to squeeze it into their already-packed schedules.
- Prioritize all work based on key results.
What if each day each of your employees had the chance to work on their most important task of the day? Wouldn’t that increase productivity and enable your team to do really good work? We all have work to do and many of us multitask to get through the day. We are bombarded with requests and demands for attention and struggle to determine which task is most important to focus on at any given time. We do our best to juggle competing priorities and stay on top of our workload, but how can we be sure that we truly have the right things on our plate? It’s simple: prioritizing your work based on key results. That's because if you can accurately define and prioritize tasks in a manageable way, then you can make sure they get completed effectively.
- Leverage your team’s strengths when assigning work.
Every team member has different strengths which can mean some members work much faster than others. For example, one person might be heavily involved in content creation whereas another excels at finding and implementing freelance talent. If you’re not bottling your team’s strengths and leveraging them effectively, you are likely losing money. Understanding your team members' strengths could save you hours of your own time and help motivate the whole team to take pride in their work and stay engaged longer. Additionally, understanding your own strengths is also a step towards setting yourself up for success by working with clients whose expectations align well with your skillset.
- Map out your team’s work before beginning any project.
Over the course of your career, you will be responsible for many projects. Sometimes there will be just a handful of tasks and sometimes there will be dozens. Regardless of the size, it’s very important to organize your team's work from the start. If you fail to effectively plan your work, you will waste time and effort on things that may turn out to be irrelevant or unnecessary. Saying that you don't know how to organize your team's work is not a valid excuse. There are several ways to divide the work and make sure everything is done on time. The key is to determine where you will get the most value out of it and then build it from there. The goal is to get the highest return on investment from each task which is made possible by having them all organized and ordered.
- Encourage cross-functional collaboration among team members.
If you have a large number of staff members, you should be sure to track your team's productivity and encourage inter-office collaboration. Everybody is connected and expected to work together - there are no isolated workers in this model of teamwork. Accordingly, everybody works both individually and as part of the team at once. You might find that setting up group projects with rewards for teams can encourage employees to think out of the box and come up with great ideas together. Grouping workers into teams will also save you time management-wise since you will be able to delegate certain tasks that may take extended periods to complete.
A workplace that’s an efficient environment for high-impact work is one where the team members are happy, healthy, engaged, and doing their best work. Happy team members are more productive and creative. Healthy team members make fewer mistakes and are more resilient to setbacks. Engaged team members care about their work and feel invested in how it’s going. And when all these elements come together, the sum of the whole is greater than its parts – your team will be able to produce high-impact results.