Five simple ways to make your team more productive
Organizing yourself often creates frustration when a new discovery dawns: everyone else is disorganized. Your boss misses deadlines. Your spouse forgets appointments. Team members drop easy assignments and interrupt you constantly. The more organized you become, the more painfully you feel other people’s disorder.
Team productivity has a greater impact on an organization than personal productivity. Your ability to reach goals has more to do with your team than you. Ideally, everyone would be trained and organized with the same, effective system, but sometimes you can’t affect that change. Fortunately, there are simple ways you can encourage your team to be more productive.
First, insist that every member of your team use an inbox. Inboxes greatly reduce interruptions and ensure that important assignments all go to one place. When team members know team assignments are sitting in that inbox–and only in that inbox–they will be much more focused on completing work for the team.
Inboxes also reduce the chance of assignments getting lost. All too often, the transfer of responsibility goes something like this: “Did you get the report I left on your chair?” or “Did you get the brief; I gave the brief to Joan to give to you?” Your team needs clear channels for handing off tasks. Checking one inbox is infinitely easier than checking your office and everyone else’s. The Law of Collection Points (from the TRO training) holds true for teams as well as individuals: “The more collection points you have, the worse things [Click title for more...]