If you lead a team within your organisation, perhaps one of the most ongoing challenges that you’ll grapple with is how to sustain productivity among your members. It may initially be easy to get the day, a week, or a month off to a productive start, but it can be difficult to keep up the momentum.
As someone who directs people towards achieving key organisational goals, what can you do to stay the course? And how can you inspire your team members to be productive by will?
At Priority Management Australia, we believe there are ways to cultivate productivity within a team setting and make this second nature among employees. But it may be a matter of changing your original mindset about what productivity is, how it works, and how it can live on in the actions and behaviours of others. To illustrate, here are five things we believe you can do to help make productivity a habit among your team:
Direct Their Focus to the “Whys” behind Your Goals
First, it’s worth considering that some of your employees may have a hard time being productive because they’ve lost sight of the bigger picture. To be quite fair, in difficult circumstances like that of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s easy for anyone to feel detached from both their community and their purpose. You might agree with your team members that if your heart’s not into it, your everyday work can feel like drudgery. How do you bring the heart back, and how do you ensure that it can keep beating even on difficult days?
As the team leader, take the time to remind everyone about why exactly you’re all striving to be productive and what everyone’s contributions mean in the grand scheme of things. Everyone has to remember that you’re not chasing productivity for its own sake but working to fulfil a need, upholding the quality of an essential service, or helping members of a particular community.
When people are constantly reminded of their “whys,” and when they have the chance to keep aligning their “whys” with their “hows,” their work becomes more meaningful to them. As a result, they’ll put more effort and thoughtfulness into it. Invite each of your team members to keep their “why” in perspective and to evoke it in their daily work.
Engineer a Culture That Celebrates Productivity
Many businesses set their targets by the fulfilment of key performance indicators or the achievement of particular business outcomes. But while these are valid standards for productivity, they may not necessarily be the most powerful or sustainable drivers for it.
There’s an argument to be had here for the importance of culture in instigating long-term productivity; the collective contribution and responsibility that employees feel for their work all start with key attitudes and behaviours that are practised in the workplace.
Priority Management Australia advocates the role of organisational cultures in influencing people and holding fellow team members to the right expectations. If you successfully create a team culture where values like hard work, collaboration, and communicability are ingrained—and where everyone shares a sense of purpose in articulating those values—you can be assured that productivity will thrive in your organisation, even when you’re not holding individual employees under the microscope.
Create Regular Routines for Team Members to Uphold Together
One thing that may account for the malaise after a warm and productive start is a lack of structure in the workflow. As the leader, you can make it one of your special responsibilities to get everyone into a productive rhythm beyond their initial start-up time. Determine the best habits or practices to keep your team members’ focus, alertness, and motivation consistent.
These routines need not be very complicated. They can involve calling your people into a daily huddle or setting aside a time of the day for everyone to deliver one-sentence reports about their progress. Even simple practices like these can ensure that team members’ best efforts won’t be limited to their positive starts.
Find Ways to Keep Team Members Updated and in Sync
People can change their perspective on productivity when they’re able to think about their productivity in a team setting as opposed to their productivity as individuals. Your overall productivity levels will shift when your team members work consistently towards their collective purpose. To make this easier for them to imbibe, find ways to keep everyone in sync and updated about each other’s whereabouts.
For instance, you can initiate short but regular meetings where everyone is engaged and in tune with what other team members are doing. You can also encourage your team members to use a medium like an online collaboration tool for project management. Team members will be able to visualise each other’s efforts as they each add their notes to an online poster board. Our experts at Priority Management Australia can walk you through some more unique methods for building a truly dynamic team.
Dispel Your Dependence on “Natural” Productivity
The last and most difficult tip in this article pertains to dismissing the myth of “naturalness” when it comes to productivity. Truth be told, if everyone simply relied on getting into a natural groove before they become productive, they actually might not be very productive at all.
Some team leaders shy away from the idea of utilising highly structured interactions or routines, precisely because they seem unnatural and artificial. But unless a leader does something to change the conditions in the workplace and engineer necessary levels of productivity, everyone’s abilities and performances will ultimately stagnate.
Don’t be afraid to take initiative and to rev up people’s engines, even if you think it’s the “unnatural” thing to do. After this repetition, there may come a point where it is no longer necessary for you to prompt your team members. In the best-case scenario, they will eventually get into the habit of being proactive by themselves.
Priority Management Australia: Creating Cultures Where Productivity is a Habit
The insights in this article are based on the Priority Management Australia method for creating productive cultures. If you want a deeper understanding of what makes your organisation tick and how to create a lasting team culture of productivity, we invite you to reach out to Priority Management Australia.
Our mission is to offer customised coaching services to organisations to lay the groundwork and let successful workplace cultures take root. We can promise you an objective view of your situation and our expertise in assessing your company culture, training your fellow leaders, and facilitating the necessary conversations to instigate cultural change.
Struggling to make your team more productive? Get in touch with us today.