27 of February, 2025

Is your team not meeting expected productivity levels? Maintaining a high level of productivity over time is not easy, as there are many influencing factors and it is not always possible to maintain the same pace of work. The problem arises when the team experiences a sustained decrease in their productivity.

Let’s see how to improve the productivity of your team in order to reverse the situation and regain the productivity of the company.

Prioritize tasks

According to Pareto’s Law, 80% of the value of work comes from 20% of effort. This demonstrates the importance of adequately managing tasks and prioritizing them. Good planning is essential for the success of the organization, and the members of each team must be able to differentiate between key tasks and less relevant or even unnecessary ones.

In this way, they will address the important ones first and not so many pending tasks will accumulate. It is also preferable to anticipate those that are harder than the ones that are apparently simpler, and to see which tasks are more profitable within the projects that our team is working on.

Each employee must be aware of the deadlines and relevance of the tasks for the results of the company or project. From team management, actions can be taken in this direction, including the elimination of unnecessary meetings. Many times these can be replaced by reports or updates, which consume much less time and do not halt team productivity. Meetings are important, but in some cases, there are more efficient communication alternatives.

Short, medium, and long-term goals

Working towards goals is a way to keep your team motivated and productive. It’s clear that the company has a goal, the final long-term objective; but precisely the fact of seeing it far away can be demotivating to some extent.

That’s why it’s always interesting to add daily or weekly goals, short-term goals that help gain ground on the way to the final goal. An additional motivation that adds to the medium-term goals, for example, monthly or quarterly.

To make these goals really efficient, it’s important to set them in advance and to do so according to the company’s priority tasks. It is also interesting to set individual and group goals.

The first ones stimulate the worker at a personal level, the second ones serve to grow the team and foster collaboration among the different members of a work team. And this is another way to reinforce team productivity.

Team cohesion

How are the relationships among team members? Competition is healthy, but it can be toxic when it leads to internal wars among team members that harm, and significantly, the team’s productivity and efficiency. It is necessary to replace competitiveness with internal collaboration.

To achieve this, it is necessary to have different profiles. One of the ones that can contribute the most in terms of team cohesion is knowledge workers, experienced members capable of collaborating with coworkers who have more difficulties.

Team-building activities serve to reinforce team cohesion, so that they know each other better and, consequently, reinforce productivity. Eliminating these toxic relationships between workers will help improve the working environment, which will result in a more productive team.

There are other ways to improve the office environment, for example by offering benefits such as flexible hours or the option to telecommute, allowing team members to balance their personal and professional lives.

Have enough workers with the right profile

A cause of productivity loss can be that the staff is not up to what is needed. And here we have two possible explanations: an insufficient workforce, with too few workers for the team’s workload who must bear a workload and work pressure higher than they can handle, or the lack of specific profiles, which forces certain workers to take on functions or tasks for which they are not trained.

Stress, disenchantment with the company and loss of productivity are the result in both cases.

All these points have one thing in common: generating the ideal space for each team member to give 100%. If staff recruitment is successful, if the environment is good and internal fights are avoided and if each member of the group knows what to do, what is important and when it should be done, you will surely improve your team’s productivity.

Maybe you as a leader and the team members have to leave your comfort zone, but the improvement in work efficiency achieved by introducing small changes is worth it. And if you have a human resources software, this task will be much simpler.

Customer-oriented, both internally and externally, specializing in the definition and implementation of HR policies, as well as talent management, recruitment, and retention. Strong leadership, communication, negotiation, organization, and team coordination skills. Over 12 years of experience in Human Resources.

Do you want to rate our article?

Average rating:

5 stars (1 votes)

★★★★★

iriserrador

HR Content Specialist

Ways to improve your team’s productivity

Prioritize tasks

Short, medium, and long-term goals

Team cohesion

Have enough workers with the right profile

Iris Serrador

Latest posts by Iris Serrador

Need help?