It can be hard enough to manage your own productivity, can’t it? Keeping yourself motivated, on task, on track, upbeat, and optimistic is a full-time job. How does anyone keep a full team humming at peak productivity? As a project manager or team leader, your job is to keep your team as efficient as possible. But it’s not easy!

Team productivity doesn’t have to be impossible to attain. With a few best practices and team collaboration tools, you can improve your team’s efficiency, keep everyone focused, and show tangible results on a day-to-day basis. Here are a few of our favorite team improvement ideas to increase productivity.

1. Set Clear Goals

Psychologists Gary Latham and Edwin Locke’s famous goal-setting theory states that employee productivity can increase from 11% to 25% if clear goals are set. Their primary principle is that employees are more motivated by well-defined goals and are more likely to focus with more challenging goals. So, set goals for your team!

When setting long-term goals, break them into smaller, more attainable steps (a.k.a. assigning tasks) that can be checked off as they’re completed. This shows progress, and visible progress is a great motivator. When possible, show the benefits of completing your team’s goals, even if they’re as straightforward as “The company will get paid, which keeps you employed.”

2. Record and Transcribe Your Meetings

Recording your team meetings is a great way to streamline your workflow, keep the entire team focused, and foster productive conversation. By recording your meetings, you eliminate the need for attention-sapping note taking, leaving everyone in the meeting free to engage in the conversation.

But it’s not enough to just record the meeting. To get the most out of your recordings, be sure to get your recordings transcribed! Reliable, accurate transcription can increase your team’s productivity by creating searchable text versions of all your meetings, eliminating the need to re-watch entire videos. They’re easily shareable, too. A good transcription company (ahem) can turn around transcripts quickly so your team can review what was discussed.

When transcribing your meetings, interviews, or any other recorded audio, accuracy matters. Reading through an entire transcript to make corrections is a productivity killer. When comparing Rev vs. Otter.ai and Rev vs. Trint, Rev’s AI transcription is proven to be more accurate than other industry leaders.

3. Hold Standup Meetings

While it can be easy to over-schedule your team, daily standups can be powerful tools to share information, set short-term goals, and foster communication. One study shows that a daily standup can increase productivity by up to 24%, but your standups themselves have to be efficient.

Here are a few tips for a productive standup meeting:

4. Integrate AI Into Your Workflow

Adding an AI assistant to your workflow can streamline your mundane tasks so your team can focus on the bigger picture. AI assistants or note-takers can attend meetings for you, and generate quotes, summaries, topic lists, and insights almost immediately after a meeting is over. They can also automatically send highlights and important data to the team.

Using an AI assistant like Rev VoiceHub can increase your productivity by 120X. Reliable, industry-leading AI speech recognition captures every word spoken in your meetings and interviews, no matter the setting or recording quality, and the insights it produces save you hours of manual analysis.

5. Balance Work and Play

Obviously, emergencies happen and sometimes it’s “all hands on deck.” But if you want everyone on your team to be willing to jump in when needed, it’s important to recognize that work hours are work hours and off hours are off hours. If you prize your team’s downtime, they’ll be more likely to prize their time on the job.

That said, if your team or company is a hard-charging, 24/7 kind of outfit and everyone knows it, that’s great. But those situations can create burnout if they aren’t managed properly. Arrange for “mandatory” downtime for every team member, and they’ll pay you back in productivity.

6. Cater to Your Remote Workers

Remote work has been a boon to teams all over the world; now the best and brightest aren’t discounted from jobs simply due to location. Despite all the benefits provided by remote work options, it can still be easy to get lost in the shuffle as a remote worker. When everyone else is in the same room, the voice on the screen is often drowned out, if not forgotten altogether.

If you manage a team that includes remote workers, it’s important to make them feel like part of the team, integrated into projects and processes just as seamlessly as onsite team members. A single unified team with no outliers works more efficiently, so it’s on the team leader to create that, whether you have one remote worker or an entire team of them.

Here are some simple things you can do to make remote team members remain engaged:

7. Use Project Tracking Software

Unless you’re working solo (and even then!), even the simplest project should be managed by cloud-based software that everyone can access on some level. Keeping track of deadlines, benchmarks, goals, next steps, and even resources and budgets can be automated so that the whole team knows exactly what is happening at all times.

A good project management tool will:

There’s project management or team productivity software for every team or project size. Most of the better tools (like Wrike, Basecamp, and Monday) are scalable with plenty of customization and templates. Find one that works for you!

8. Make Communication a Priority

Not everything needs to be a meeting, but alternative options like emails can be informal and slow. While face-to-face communication is always preferred, remote work is the reality today. And heck, even in-person communication might require a team member to get up from their desk and stroll to another office. Who wants to do that?

Team chat tools like Slack, Notion, Google Chat, Discord, or even Microsoft Teams are essential for instant or informal communication. The team is more likely to ask quick questions or hold short discussions with a readily available chat tool.

However, it’s important to set expectations with any group chat tool. What’s appropriate for the group, what should be limited to one-on-one conversations, and what’s a topic for a meeting should be very clear to everyone on the team.

9. Don’t Over-Schedule Your Team

Sometimes, you just gotta have a meeting. There’s no denying that. But too many meetings that, yes, could have been emails are the surest way to kill a team’s productivity. If everyone’s meeting about a project, that means no one is actively working on the project (brainstorm sessions excluded). If you’re the billable-hours type of team, take a moment in your next meeting and calculate the billable hours that the meeting cost. You’d be shocked at how high those numbers get. Is it a productive use of dollars, time, and team morale?

Harvard Business Review surveyed 182 senior managers in a range of industries: 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work. 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together.

We’re not saying to not have meetings. Your daily standup is an essential (and productive) part of the team’s day. But effective daily standup meetings succeed where others fail because they’re short and packed with purpose. The next time you schedule a team meeting, ask yourself:

10. Install Productivity Metrics

Productivity metrics are a way to measure how productive each member of the team is. However, knowing how to track productivity isn’t always apparent. Some jobs, especially in creative fields, are hard to quantify. How do you measure the “productivity” of someone who provides insights? Or a team manager? Sales goals, content clicks or word counts only cover certain jobs.

There’s no single metric that will cover everyone, but here are a few ways to measure productivity on your team:

There are specific productivity metrics built for many industries like sales, customer service, software development, and SEO, so make sure to take the time to find the metrics that work best for your team’s work.

11. Automate Your Workflow

There are a number of different ways you can automate your workflow, and chances are, your team is already doing it on some level. You know that spell-check that helps edit your documents and emails? That’s automation! Using AI to handle the mundane parts of the day-to-day not only frees the team up to do the important work, it improves morale and, in turn, the quality of the work.

Automation comes in many forms, from software that sorts and files your inbox to AI CRM tools to online voice recorders that automatically transcribe your audio. With workflow automation tools, your team can automatically:

12. Reward Quality

Many companies have moved away from the billable hours method because the pressure to meet billable goals can be stressful for team members, leading to inefficiency and indecision about how to spend time. Billable hour goals reward quantity over quality, and by definition, leads to more work that’s less effective.

Quality can mean a lot of things to a team. Maybe it’s meeting a certain KPI for a project. Maybe it’s just a great idea someone presented to the team. Maybe it’s a satisfied client. Whatever quality work means to you, be sure to reward it when your team displays it. You don’t always have to throw a pizza party for quality work; sometimes a nice word encouraging team members in the daily standup is enough. But if team members know that their good work will be noticed, they’ll work to produce more good work.

13. Embrace Technology. But Not Too Much.

A team that knows it’ll be provided the best tools to do their jobs is a happy team. Implementing new tools for workflow automation, using AI to simplify mundane tasks like taking meeting notes, or tracking project statuses—things that make the job easier, essentially—are usually appreciated and allow the team to focus on bigger-picture tasks. But there can be such a thing as too much technology.

Every time you introduce a new project management software, communication app, market research tool, or SEO widget to the team, time must be spent by each team member learning to use it. And there’s such a thing as too many tools! How many things would the team need to log into each day? Consolidate where you can, and don’t be too quick to switch to the shiny new thing. New tech should be used to address a problem, not just because it’s there.

How Can I Track Team Productivity?

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the most direct way to track team productivity, but they’re not the only way. Self-rated productivity surveys, revenue per employee (RPE), and billable hour rates are other tangible ways to track team productivity.

Team Efficiency Killers

For every one thing you do to increase team productivity, it seems like 10 things can kill it. The easiest efficiency killers for the whole team to avoid are:

Rev Knows Team Productivity

No matter your industry, Rev has tools that can increase teamwork and make everyone on the team more productive. Through automation tools and AI assistants that handle tedious day-to-day tasks for you, Rev can help your whole team do their jobs better. Which makes your job easier.

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