Whether you are an individual contributor or a manager, work performance is the thing that decides whether you hit your goals. Continuing from part one, here are the remaining ways to improve it.
More on team performance
13. Give people variety
People get bored doing the same task over and over. Give them room to vary the work, or the way they do it, by mixing solo work with team work. It brings some fresh air into the job and it develops their skills at the same time. Rotating people through different positions also gives them a much better picture of how the whole company works.
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14. Invest in training
Training raises the quality of your team, and it also makes people want to contribute more. Pay particular attention to your middle managers. They are the ones who keep a team pointed in the right direction.
Leadership training for that layer has an outsized effect on company-wide productivity, because it compounds through everyone they lead.
15. Improve the organisation itself
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Set a baseline. Work out your revenue per working hour, how long each service or product takes to deliver, how long production actually runs.
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Identify the areas to improve. Be specific about which ones. Vague targets never survive contact with a long term goal.
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Set up a process for change. Trial new processes and check whether the numbers you set as your baseline actually move.
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Train the managers. They are the ones running the people who deliver the projects.
Using technology properly
16. Save time and effort with tools
When you choose a technical solution, pick the one that costs your team the least time and effort. The whole point of the tool is to save time. A tool that needs more babysitting than the work it replaces is not a tool, it is another job.
17. Give people decent computers
Using old machines to save money looks sensible on a spreadsheet. But once a machine is slow enough that people wait on it, the loss in output costs more than the hardware. New machines also send a clear message: leadership wants people working with good tools.
18. Provide the right platforms
Your team needs technology support to work productively, including in the gaps when they are waiting on something else. Things worth providing:
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Phones and tablets. So people can check mail and edit documents while moving around.
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Laptops. Essential for remote work, but only if they are properly synced with the company’s systems.
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Cloud storage. Storing and collaborating in the cloud makes everything easier, and lets people access the system from anywhere.
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Collaboration tools. Messaging and video tools keep people connected when they cannot meet in person.
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Anything that syncs devices together. What sits on the desktop should be available on the laptop, the phone and the tablet. That is what makes a team genuinely flexible.
19. Learn the skills deliberately
If you do not know how to manage your time, or how to handle pressure, work stalls and paperwork piles up. These are learnable skills, not personality traits. A short course, a good book, or a month of deliberately practising one technique will move you further than another productivity app.
20. Encourage a task manager
Using a to-do or reminder app is one of those small changes with surprisingly large results. A good one lets you order work by due date or other criteria, which is what keeps projects landing on time. For a manager it also gives visibility into the task list of every person on a given project, not just your own.
21. Prefer focused tools over one giant tool
Software built for one specific purpose tends to be better at it and easier to learn. Your team will pick up a focused tool much faster than a sprawling platform that does twenty things adequately.
That is the full list of 21. You will not apply all of them at once, and you should not try. Pick two or three that fit your situation, run them for a month, and keep the ones that stuck.
