How to improve your team’s performance in 5 steps

Improving your team’s performance is directly correlated to your bottom line as a business. And fortunately, it’s not very difficult – but certainly requires discipline, a strategic approach, and a solid plan. 

Luckily, we’ve got you covered with 5 simple steps that will help you see a radical improvement in your team’s performance and productivity. 

 Establish a Single, Streamlined Communications Platform 

One of the most useful ways to improve team performance is to boost team communication and collaboration.

In fact, research has shown that effective communication can increase team productivity by up to 25% ! Which means that implementing a robust communication tool and effective collaboration strategies is the single most important decision you can make to amp up team productivity.

In the age of hybrid working, communication is much more than just emails and water cooler chat. Now, it’s critical to use a range of mediums – including chat, video calls, emails, and collaborative documents – to effectively communicate.

Unfortunately, that too often means using a range of apps (like Zoom, Slack, and Email) , which creates a highly disintegrated and disorganized experience. For that reason, we highly recommend the Spike app as the go-to tool to streamline team communications.

With Spike, you’ll have free webmail, group chat, video chat, calendar collaborative documents, tasks and to-dos in a single omni-channel platform. No more scrolling through a bunch of apps to find the right message – Spike has it all ! 

Establish Business Goals

To radically improve productivity, you can’t just keep doing the same old thing. Instead, you’ll need to have a long hard look at your business priorities. You’ll need to analyze the gap between your business’ long-term goals, and the day-to-day activities team members are engaging in to determine which actions add the most value to further your objectives.

Following this analysis, you’ll often come up with new initiatives your company and teams should be engaging in. But even more important is to cut initiatives that are not working, or do not add optimal value.

A big part of improving productivity is to ensure your team isn’t wasting energy on initiatives that actually have very little impact on your long-term goals..

Establish Ambitious but Realistic KPIs 

Once you’ve established your overarching business goals, your next step is to trickle those down to team and individual objectives.

In addition to team meetings that establish a vision, have one-on-one conversations to ensure each team member understands their required output and the key performance metrics their success will be judged by. Also outline how much time you expect team members to spend on each task or goal..

This will help your team members be consistently clear about their priorities and the key projects they are focusing on. But make sure you don’t micromanage; instead empower your employees, which will have the added benefit of team members feeling personal responsibility and pride over the tasks they accomplish independently.

Describe the required outcome and success metrics, and then allow them the independence to achieve these goals. 

Streamline Task Management

Once Key Performance Indicators and tasks for your team have been defined and communicated, you’ll also need to ensure these are managed effectively and completed inefficiently.

And that means using a project management tool, where you’ll be able to see pending and completed tasks, dependencies, and any issues you may need to step in as a leader to tackle.

There’s a range of project management tools you can choose from, such as Jira, Zoho CRM, or Monday.com. Whatever tool you choose, do it carefully: there’s no point in setting up great strategies and a robust communication tool if you aren’t able to follow up on tasks effectively. 

Reward Productivity 

Once you have all the above steps implemented, you’re likely to see a significant jump in your team’s productivity.

However, what you’ll want to see is now just a spike in productivity – but a sustained improvement. And the best way to consistently engage, motivate, and get the best out of your team is to reward them for their productive behavior ! Whether it’s a pizza party or a fun event to celebrate the meeting of team goals, or individual bonuses to reward stellar performance, in the end it boils down to human psychology: people will continue to engage in behavior for which they receive positive reinforcement!