3 Culture Tips for Increasing Team Efficiency
The majority of organizations have the same goal in mind: to improve their results and reach new heights. They know that for a business to grow, they must focus on team effort. One of the ways to accomplish this is by increasing workplace efficiency. Workplace efficiency enables employees to perform their tasks effectively and work on meeting the same goals while knowing how to organize their time and effort.
Essentially, team efficiency is about helping employees work smarter and more productively. Several factors such as leadership, work environment, training, processes, job satisfaction, and culture affect the employees’ productivity and efficiency in the workplace. Ultimately, when an organization wants to teach employees to make the most of their time, everything comes down to making improvements to the day-to-day culture.
Efficiency and culture go hand in hand and are both long-term strategic concerns. When employees get the necessary training for individual efficiency and the necessary structure for group efficiency, a culture that makes the most of an organization’s human and financial resources will be created.
Below, we take a look at three culture tips for increasing team efficiency.
Develop Effective Collaboration
Team building is a big aspect that companies must focus on to increase team efficiency. For a business to thrive, each of the company’s employees needs to feel like they’re part of something big and work alongside people who are on the same team. The perfect way to achieve this is by organizing team-building activities.
When you and your team members have fun together, you get closer to each other - and this promotes your pursuit of common goals.
There are many options to choose from and lately, one of the most popular ideas is taking your employees to lunch or scheduling an evening to grab a couple of drinks after work. If you’re looking to host a little more productive team-building events, you can consider organizing a lunch and learn event. According to Hoppier, lunch and learn is a fun combination of a learning and social event and can help you maximize your employees' professional development, their skill-building, and team bonding at the same time.
You could also arrange events, different games, and contests, to help your team bond. Remote working teams can arrange this with a site that offers virtual team building events, like www.escapely.com for example. The goal is to get your employees to spend more time together and develop effective collaboration, usually by having them do something that’s not directly related to their work.
Understand Personal Time Management
We live in a world that has a myriad of digital technological tools available which allows employees to get more access to information than ever before. Although it looks like speeding up the transfer of information might lead to greater efficiency, this comes with an increase in distracting digital notifications and expectations for swift responses.
So how come many unimportant pieces of information effectively distract us? With the available technology “sparing” us so much time, it’s easy to think we’d have a quick minute to keep up with minor tasks and our interests while working on more demanding projects. With these minor distractions, employees face a difficult time returning to work.
This is where time management comes into play. As an employer, you should encourage time management activities and educate your employees on them, so you don’t have to worry about looking over your shoulder to ensure they are managing their time and tasks efficiently.
For instance, this can be done simply by developing a tutorial for sorting and filtering work email or even setting. Your employees must also learn to prioritize certain tasks and structure projects. If a project is structured in a good way, there are clear goals and guidance on how to achieve them. It makes prioritizing their job easier. Prioritizing and planning time is a challenge for most people.
Obstacles always appear along the way, but these can usually be handled efficiently with proper time management skills.
Get Proactive With Performance
Regular performance management is the third proactive step that will guarantee increased efficiency in the workplace. Performing regular evaluation and communication on the performance of employees will help resolve issues that might stop employees from implementing time management and collaboration principles.
The communication in the group needs to be open, honest, and respectful to increase efficiency in the workplace. It should be the driver of improvement and help in developing the capacity and skills of employees. The time and resources of performance management will, in the end, be considered an investment in your employees and not an inefficient use of funds.
Final Thoughts
When you implement these three culture tips properly, you’ll achieve much more than just increasing team efficiency in the workplace. You’ll develop a strong and effective team culture, which will promote great work and, in turn, result in long-term business growth.