How to Boost Team Productivity from the Inside Out
Over the last three to four years, there has been an increased focus from business owners on boosting team and labour productivity. With rising costs, getting a return on labour has been more important than ever. Various methods have been tried such as providing financial incentives, working on healthy lifestyle practices, skill training, team building days and personal development.
All these options can work, yet what I see missing from many businesses is the culture foundation that focuses on reducing wastage, building team cohesion, improving communication, and ensuring time and energy is used wisely.
Below is a structure that will help build a strong workplace culture, resulting in increases to overall team productivity. The key line to remember here is Culture always leads the commercial.
- Creation
What’s critical is that the business structure is created based on what the business owners would like to achieve, and what matters most in their lives. You get to choose a business by design, rather than a business that evolves by default. Think about what matters most in your life right now, including financial, health, family, and legacy. Make a ‘choice’ to build a business that supports what matters most, because if it’s not supporting the business owners and their goals, it will not be supporting the team.
- Direction
Many strategic plans, talk about a business vision. Personally, I prefer to keep it simple and ask this question where is the business going over the next 12 to 24 months? What is the direction you wish to take your business and what are the non-negotiable values that will assist you and your team head in this direction? Having clear direction and Core Values are two of the most important ingredients in building an amazing culture.
- Connection
Once you have created in your mind (and on paper), the ideal business and you have clear Direction (Vision) and Core Values in place, it’s important to share this with your team. Helping them understand how their role specifically fits into the bigger picture. Create a game, with individual and team performance measures. This will assist in cohesively bringing your organisation together, focusing on what matters most.
A game can be created around:
- Reducing reactive travel
- Reducing errors/call backs
- Reducing scheduling errors
- Increasing Google reviews
- Generating customer referrals
- Gross profit per job/project
- Reflection
As a business leader and team, taking time to meet as a group and check in on how the business is performing will allow progress to accelerate. By evaluating whether you are on track or off track, will allow you to stay in tune and correct the course if required. If the business is on track, it’s vital to acknowledge the performance of your team because what gets rewarded gets repeated.
- Correction
This involves communicating back with specific feedback, re-direction, and alignment on a regular basis. Let individuals know how they are performing. Fundamentally all employees want to show up every day, do a great job and be acknowledged for it. Correction does not mean a kick in the backside! This is a great opportunity to identify what systems and procedures are missing, that if they were in place would enable the team to perform at a higher level.
If you are committed to improving your team’s productivity, put the groundwork in by building a foundational culture. Once implemented and followed consistently profits that result from this type of organisation often exceed the industry standard.
Written by Jon Mailer
CEO PROTRADE United
Author of ‘Not Just a Tradie’
www.protradeunited.com.au
1300 767 774
