Improving team performance. Personal productivity

First of all, I should say I believe nobody wants to do their work badly or slower than they can, but sometimes there are obstacles to employees doing their best. So this short article is not about how to push your employees but how to detect obstacles and remove them.

Analysing my experience and structuring it, I classified those obstacles into four categories.

1. Lack of energy

According to my experience, we all have a limited amount of energy for a day, a week, and a month. We can increase that amount by reducing stress (on the Internet you can find lots of articles on that theme, so I wouldn’t like to go into details), improving the quality of rest, but we can’t eliminate that obstacle fully. The best thing we can do is stop disturbing our employees when that is not necessary. Also, we can remind them about rest or recommend a vacation when it is needed.

2. Lack of knowledge: What to do, How to do, and Why to do

This obstacle is the result of our management mistake. We must make sure that every team member knows why they do their work and understands its purpose. If you have a problem with that, try to link every small task to a bigger goal and every goal to the organization’s success. Do not forget to train your team, it helps to avoid the lack of confidence in their strengths and skills. Also, if your employees do not know what to do, they aren’t able to complete the task. Try to track the time spent on understanding the task, and maybe you will be surprised.

3. Internal conflict, disagreement, or distrust of the task

If you think that your task is useless, it will be hard to accomplish it. This situation can be the result of arguing, compromise, misunderstanding, etc. Control the emotional state of your employees, find out hidden disagreements, and prove that the task is the right way to reach the goal. Sometimes the task might turn out to be really wrong, so working with that obstacle can be doubly rewarding.

4. External distraction

Concentration is important for efficient work, but you lose your concentration if you get notifications from the work messenger every 5 minutes. Help your employees organize their workplace in a way to avoid distractions and explain why this is important. Likewise, we can only decrease the level of distraction in the first point, so we should return to that point from time to time.

This is not the complete list of obstacles, but I hope that it will be a good start for developing personal productivity in your team.