Higher productivity allows your team to deliver more with less. This applies equally to quality, quantity, and ability.
First of all, productivity should never be measured by inputs. This means stop worrying about:
- Number of hours worked
- Tasks finished
- Clock in/out times
It’s also not about cramming more work into less space.
Productivity allows you to spend less energy delivering the same results. Drive your team to new heights with these universally productivity-boosting tactics:
Dashboard your outcomes
Knowing where you stand as a team on your biggest efforts is essential.
Do we need to make a big push? Are we ahead of schedule? Is the boss going to be happy?
An effective way to do this is with dashboards.
- Identify the short-term accomplishments your team is driving toward
- Determine anything you can measure to prove you’re getting close
- Measure it and display
And make sure they’re outcomes, not outputs.
Outputs, like “tasks finished”, “lines of code,” or “hours worked” don’t matter if you miss the point.
If you display any metrics, be very careful of Goodhart’s Law. Don’t accidentally encourage “gaming the system” by making the metric the goal. Metrics are a byproduct of your labor, not an end.
For example, social media managers could measure “engagement” but shouldn’t necessarily measure “Number of posts”. More posts don’t matter if no one is interacting with them.
Write more
Improving your team’s collective writing skills powers better asynchronous work.
Not to mention, better writing leads to efficient information transfers. Learning to reduce five paragraphs to 140 characters saves a lot of time, especially over the long run.
Other tactics with writing:
- Use bullet points. They are easy to consume.
- Read all your writing out loud before sending.
- Re-write complicated sentences until they aren’t.
- Only use jargon if you have to.
Common advice says that most books could be blogs and most blogs could be a tweet.
Work together without meetings
Productive dialog shouldn’t be restricted by a clock.
If your team is on the cusp of a breakthrough, or finishes vetting an idea quickly, why should the “meeting time” or the “booked room” decide when to finish?
Don’t schedule a calendar meeting when working with others on the team. It creates unnecessary pressure to fit things into a slot.
Almost all meeting platforms today offer ad-hoc calls if you’re working remotely. Use it. Just call each other and hit the ground running.
End the call when you’re done. You don’t even need to turn the video on.
Ad-hoc calls make collaboration feel more natural, and they’re easier to end at a more responsible point.
You can apply the same concept in person – find a space to work together without the restrictions of a calendar time slot.
Protect Monday and Friday
The best way to kill any chance of building momentum on your team is to schedule a series of meetings on the first day of the week.
A proven way to increase stress is to schedule things on the last day of the week, including Friday deadlines.
Momentum has to be created. Creating space to warm up at the front end of the week allows all your teammates to ease into the activities. Opening Mondays up also gives your team time to properly prepare for any meetings you need to have.
In most cases, the end of the week should create space for wrapping up little things and having closure before the weekend. Stacking deadlines, meetings, or interruptions into a Friday afternoon just because is inconvenient, to put it lightly.
Protecting these days from interruptions grants superpowers to your team’s ability to preserve energy and remove distractions.
Find ways to cancel meetings
Have you ever heard the phrase, “We can end early and give you time back.”?
The punchline is the joke: if meetings are stealing time from us they aren’t necessarily helpful.
Meetings interrupt, are often not delivering work, and always require context switching. Odds are good that if you aren’t meeting, you’re working on something else.
Coordination, planning, and working meetings are valuable when they’re managed and led well – but these are the exception, not the rule.
Canceling a single 1-hour meeting for 5 people automatically creates 5 hours (+ tax) of time for the team.
After all, most meetings could have been an email!