Todd NesnickA team is only as strong as the sum of its parts. Ensuring your team can reach its full potential means engaging and connecting with every one of its members, making sure they have the resources needed to do their job well, and creating an open, transparent, and supportive team culture.
How to do this? Just a few small changes can make a big difference. From deploying high-quality team communication apps to putting in place mechanisms for skill development, use the hints and tips below to empower your team and boost its productivity.
Get the Best Collaboration Resources in Place
For the best connected, most productive, and happiest team possible, you need to have the right collaborative tools in place to support this – especially important if you manage a remote or hybrid workforce.
What does this look like in the real world? It’s making sure your team members have the ability to connect from anywhere, via a range of devices, reliably and securely. It also means bringing on board a dedicated team collaboration app to enable your employees to work together seamlessly via one platform, sharing messages and editing documents together in real time.
Of the many options out there, consider a best-in-class solution such as the team collaboration app with Spike. This one-stop-shop communication tool offers unique conversational email, which flows like instant messaging, and the ability to switch from messaging to video calling to audio calls in-app, so your team can stay focused on what matters.
Connect with Your Team
Connecting with each individual member of your team on a personal level, and getting to know what motivates them, is one of the best ways of unlocking your team’s potential. This is about having regular one-to-ones with your staff members and practicing active listening whenever possible.
Making a habit of rolling up your sleeves and getting out onto the office or shop floor to help your team will not only be highly appreciated by your employees but will help with the process of connecting with your staff. Plus, it’ll give you valuable insight into the challenges your team faces on a daily basis and the practicalities of their work.
Transparency and Leading by Example
The best managers lead by example to inspire their team and motivate their members to work to their full potential every day. Key to this is positivity, flexibility, a can-do attitude, and great communication skills. Transparency is also an intrinsic element of being an effective leader, and promoting an open, transparent office culture is likely to be beneficial in many ways.
For starters, transparency promotes trust and helps team members to understand exactly how their role fits into the overarching goals and values of the business. In turn, this boosts engagement and morale – and productivity will soar as a result.
Ensure that all team members feel able to express themselves, their concerns, or their ideas in meetings or through other channels. Introduce means of actioning changes to be made as a result of employee feedback so that your team can see it’s being listened to.
Develop Team Members’ Skills
Helping your individual team members to develop their skills and progress their careers is a great way to ensure your workforce is firing on all cylinders! If you have a member of staff who particularly enjoys, for example, the graphic design side of marketing work, consider allowing them to shadow a senior member of staff working in this area on occasion.
Regular training, either via third-party providers or in-house, is also a great idea to keep your workforce’s skills up-to-date. This training could be on subjects as diverse as improving communication to learning advanced Excel skills.
Conducting yearly training needs assessments can be a useful way of staying on top of things, as can analyzing performance gaps within your team. Find these early enough, and you may be able to skill up a staff member to fill the gap.
Resolve Conflicts Quickly
And finally, it’s important to identify and resolve conflicts arising within your team swiftly. Hybrid teams may be particularly liable to issues with an us-and-them mentality developing between the office-based staff members and those working remotely.
Making sure that everyone is crystal clear on their roles and responsibilities, as well as those of other staff members, is key to avoiding conflict – and the culture of transparency we talked about above will help, too.
If conflict or disharmony arises, tackle this as soon as possible to prevent further problems or a schism from developing (or widening) within the team. Identify the problems, and work with the relevant parties to come up with a long-term solution rather than taking a sticking-plaster approach.
Helping Your Team Be the Best it Can Be
Taking the steps needed to ensure your team is working to its full potential can deliver significant results – as well as boosting productivity exponentially; you’ll also see a happier, more engaged workforce.
Use the guide above to tweak your management approach to help every member of your team feel valued, heard, and motivated and prepare to reap some spectacular business results.