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4 Simple Ways to Increase Staff Productivity
Developing a work environment that constantly delivers a high level of productivity is challenging, especially when you’re on the go and have to travel around the globe to film. It requires an extraordinary communication and efficient time management. Productivity encompasses a variety of self-disciplines but is hinged on collective team support. Maintaining productivity at work requires discipline and must be constantly practiced. The staff is the heartbeat of the organization. They provide the day-to-day administrative and operational support necessary to keeping the machine running. It’s absolutely imperative that management remains aware on how to continuously foster and support techniques that get more productivity out of their staff. Here are some recommendations that can help build efficient productivity among your staff.
Encouraging Support
When members of our Production or Administrative staff are out on vacation or sick-leave their responsibilities don’t yield in their absence. Let’s be honest coming back to the office and being buried under seemingly never-ending amounts of work is not motivating. While you can’t expect your team to take care of all your responsibilities, it’s certainly helpful when they provide support and have your back. Encouraging support is a great way to build loyalty and camaraderie. Employees that support each other without the need for upper management intervention builds a lasting foundation for highly-effective operational output.
Collaborative Leadership
Instead of just delegating tasks to staff and running your company from a position of dictatorship why not try getting in the trenches. When you decide to work alongside your staff rather than delegate and monitor, it’s a big sign of openness. A Director of Photography usually takes on the responsibility of managing the corporate production. The DP must heavily rely upon their leadership abilities to keep things running smoothly. The DP’s that choose to hit the ground running with a set course of actions, and not scared to immerse themselves in the process, usually have the greatest success. When managers decide to collaborative with their team, they evoke more passion and creativity. This creates a sustainable work environment that is constantly open for collaboration.
Below you will find two video examples of corporate executives giving insight on how collaborative leadership is a necessary component of success.
In this short video excerpt Noel Wallace (President Colgate-Palmolive N.A) outlines his view of collaborative leadership and the power it has to achieve goals and engage diverse thought.
IBM hosted a THINK Forum in New York City back in September 2011. This video of Inhi Cho Suh (VP of Product Management at IBM) was created to promote IBM’s THNIK platform. In the video excerpt she discusses collaborative leadership and how collaboration is at the root of society.
Effective Communication
Time is a valuable commodity. Wasting too much time discussing task execution can interfere with the task at hand. Networking and collaboration are important foundational principles when trying to adopt a more efficient workflow. While it’s certainly not viable in most
corporate environments to do away with meeting altogether, creating less time-consuming methods of communicating ideas can serve as a stronger productivity booster. It’s simply a matter of prioritizing the meeting schedule so that it doesn’t interfere with your staff’s core tasks. Managers must also remain mindful of other communication protocols to relay task agendas. Instead of calling all employees to the conference room, would an email be a better course of action? Is this something we could instant message about? The key is to keep your staff in their element as much as possible, and manage how you communicate more effectively.
Benchmarking & Recognition
Providing valuable feedback is an essential function of building a strong team. The feedback doesn’t always have to be positive; the key is to provide concise and actionable directives that will help increase performance. Every team member should be held accountable for their performance and productivity, but it’s also the responsibility of management to recognize great work. The weekly staff meetings we have here at Crews Controls help us identify areas that need improvement. Every team member is responsible for reporting their weekly performance. Each of our individual reports helps us collectively brainstorm on ways to improve company efficiency. It’s our systematic way of benchmarking individual and company production. Benchmarking performance is a critical element of increasing productivity. To become a stronger team we have to identify the weak spots, and come up with practical solutions to fix them. So as management, if you notice productivity is up, a little recognition will definitely help build team morale.
We want to hear from you. What are some of the methods you employ to increase productivity among staff members? Do you agree or disagree with any of the ideas mentioned in this post? Let’s talk about it.
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