Employee productivity management requires a series of individual steps. One must measure the required tasks, collect performance data, maintain two-way communications, analyze results and create a basis for decision making. We must go beyond gut feelings or feelings of affinity and begin closely monitoring our workflows. You may think that this would lead to an increased workload, but in reality, the opposite occurs. With a good management platform, you can automate internal processes and seamlessly integrate your employees to get better results.
However, increased automation needs to be allied to vigorous leadership. You must be aware of the importance of the role of managers in increasing team performance. A company’s organizational culture, when directed towards productivity management, is an excellent way to reap the rewards. However, there is a study that has revealed the pivotal role of managers and directors. More broadly, or in less hierarchical organizations, we are referring to leaders.
The study was conducted by McKinsey in conjunction with the London School’s Center for Economic Performance, together with the U.S. universities Stanford and Harvard. It concluded that the action of leaders has a decisive impact on the company’s productivity.
According to the study, more than 80% of all productivity variation occurs within a given sector and is linked to the culture of the country in which companies are located – and that influences the leadership culture as well. That’s the reason why multinational companies largely outperform local enterprises – they can imprint a more efficient management model on their local operations, regardless of the country where the company is operating.
Identifying obstacles
Automation will support personnel management and productivity management. So, to help you solve any problems, first, we need to identify any possible factors that may be undermining your efficiency and that of your team. Challenges and obstacles, such as failures in communication, poorly defined task prioritization, and a clash of expectations concerning deadlines and deliveries are likely to be constant sources of friction within any company. A reality at many companies is that managers often spend their time playing the role of school prefect, monitoring their teams’ actions and performance, rather than focusing on team development and thinking strategically. All this can be resolved by a change in internal processes and some technological upgrades.
1. Seamless communications
These days, e-mails often get lost in your employees’ crowded inboxes. Another possibility is that often your team members may have to remember to look in specific WhatsApp groups, scrolling through long texts, to see what decisions were made. The use of a management platform, which collates disparate information, analyzing it to help distribute demands and control the time dedicated to specific tasks, is fundamental in such cases. An example of such a tool is Runrun.it. Using this technology in your company, it becomes possible to centralize your communications so that your demands, tasks, changes to deadlines and critical files are all stored in the same, easily-accessible place.
The platform makes it easy to share content with your team or even the whole company. It can distribute any demands, following specific activities and transferring the ownership of tasks from one employee to another, facilitating the cohesion of employees who may even be geographically dispersed. Take a look at some of the tools’ functionalities and features that will streamline your communications, in this article.
2. Clearer goals and deadlines
One of the biggest challenges for managers is the dichotomy between goals and deadlines. Setting overly ambitious or even unfeasible goals (for a given period) will hinder a company’s long-term performance and prevent them from attaining even more modest gains.
Therefore, productivity management is a critical ally for not just managers, but for every employee. After all, both managers and employees can focus more on the work at hand when they know exactly what is expected of them and can participate in the planning of shared deadlines. Management software like Runrun.it is also extremely useful in this case because its’ task lists prioritize the most important activities, while automatically calculating how long it will take to deliver them. The system’s powerful, built-in algorithms will also create alerts when a specific deadline is likely to be breached.
3. Time management for leaders and makers
Take stock of your activities as a manager and think about whether you see yourself as more of a leader or a maker. If your focus is guiding your team and looking at the project from a birds-eye point of view, and your day is filled with tasks that can be accomplished relatively quickly, you can be considered a leader-manager. However, if you have more of a “maker” profile, performing long, complex tasks, bringing projects to a conclusion, while often needing to focus on specific subjects for longer periods, you are a maker-manager. Read more about these types of managers in this article by Paul Graham, a co-founder of Y Combinator, an American consultancy and seed accelerator.
Leaders can perform tasks for makers, and vice versa, especially in lean times. However, you need to identify your profile and that of your team to understand how to manage your time. Leaders work best by dividing the day into hours, with periods for reading messages, having meetings, conducting strategic planning, making decisions, and so on. Makers have to plan their days, weeks, and even months, in larger blocks of time, as often their tasks take up larger segments of time, and unplanned tasks that interrupt them can undermine their productivity and their focus on their principal function.
When your profile as a manager becomes clear, everything becomes easier. If you are an entrepreneur with a maker bias, consider grouping together your leader tasks into one or two days a week, by setting meetings in blocks, for example. Then, you can focus on more single-minded tasks for the rest of the week, without fear of interruption.
Throughout this process, Runrun.it can act as your facilitator. Using the tool, you will be able to control the daily flow of your team’s demands, monitor individual performance, and optimize the time invested by all your employees, all in real-time. If you use this technology, your team’s will no longer fail to execute their deliverables, miss any commitments, and you will be able to ensure that your company consistently adheres to the strategy you put in place. Not only that, but the data that is generated on productivity will help you to complete fairer and more transparent performance appraisals.
4. Monitor the execution of your deliverables
To avoid creating an agenda that only works in theory, you must control the hours invested in each project. It is the only way that you will be able to understand and adjust your predictions and planned workflows. At the same time, you will then improve your performance and that of your team. This is another area where Runrun.it is extremely useful, making your routines more practical and efficient, through the use of automated timesheets.
With an easy-to-understand system that lets employees click to “play,” pause and deliver their tasks, you can keep track of the progress of your team’s workflows in real-time. You will be able to monitor whether the team is on schedule, and make decisions based on accurate, up-to-date reports. We discuss the concept of time management at greater length in this article.
Through monitoring the hours invested your deliverables, it becomes easy to identify potential distractions and discover when tasks are ordered in such way as to become prejudicial to your team’s productivity. You will also be able to pinpoint any bottlenecks in your operations.
5. Prepare for Unplanned Events
You tirelessly plan your schedules, combing the details of each project, in an attempt to foresee every possibility so that you are not caught simply reacting to every problem. To prevent those problems from occurring, a tool like Runrun.it is fundamental. With it, you can allocate a specific amount of time for potential interruptions and reduce the risk of serious emergencies. When you are scheduling longer tasks, add unallocated time periods of 10 to 20 minutes between each one. Let your team know that you will be available during those periods, while the rest of the time you will be extremely focused on the task at hand. These mini-breaks will be used for resolving any unexpected problems, questions and anything else that suddenly appears on your desk.
Lists to increase productivity
It’s worth sharing some final tips that will help you not only control but also increase your productivity: the time-honored lists. Organizing your priorities into lists is one of the most frequent tips you come across, so much so that you are probably tired of reading about it. However, establishing a sequence of tasks that you must accomplish, whether it’s in your corporate or personal life, has always been a simple and efficient short-cut to improved productivity.
These productivity hacks contain everything you need to know to improve your productivity and several other essential tips.
Want to improve productivity management? Automate!
As you can see, it is essential to have an automation tool like Runrun.it to improve your management and productivity control. Using it, you will be able to automate your operations and your internal processes. This will save time, lower your costs, and make your team more efficient and productive.
You will accomplish all this by using clear and objective features like our new Dashboard, which that gathers all of your important data on a single page. Avoid micromanagement, free up more time for strategic planning, make more assertive deliveries, and improve your bottom line. Sign up now for a free trial at http://runrun.it.
