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5-Steps to Turbo Charging Your Team's Productivity
I promise to blog about behavioral analytics soon. Promise. But I have a valueable tangent that I think will be helpful to many (including myself).
Let's get productive What I want to share about goes beyond job description or industry. You may be a developer, a customer rep, a QA specialist, a manager, or CEO. You may be in software, or aerospace, or fashion, or farming. No matter who you are, one universal thing we all care about is reaching our goals. Making progress. Just getting stuff done, and hopefully getting it done without great confusion, pain, or hair loss. I mean, who doesn't want to be more productive?
I'm sure you've all said this before: "I've been so busy running around all day, helping people and working on so many things... But I feel like I didn't get anything done!" This happens to all of us. Lots of things can steal our productivity, like context switching, or unclear requirements, or when coworkers keep showing you the latest photos of cats playing piano (guilty). So some things definitely decrease our productivity and we need to minimize those.
But we can also do things that maximize productivity. Now, I don't claim to be an authority in this subject, but my team has found some practices that really work for us and have helped us to work faster, be more focused, and even feel happier at the end of each work week (and no, I'm not referring to the happy hour that the LA office has every Friday afternoon). I believe the following 5 disciplines have been our "secret sauce" to increasing our productivity, and I believe they can help you and your team too.
1) Make a shared task list that your team can learn to love and own. Now, I know this sounds super basic, but don't log off and leave just yet. Most people have a list, or board, or backlog, or whatever you want to call it. But there are some guidelines that will make your list a useful tool, and not something that the team gets confused by:
2) Meet with purpose, and meet often. I've been to so many meetings that leave people thinking, "What was the point of that?" Even worse when it was a long meeting because that's a lot of wasted time. No more. My team has meetings that are more than just useful, but we instictively meet because it helps us get things done fast.
3) Prioritize your tasks. This one sounds the simplest, but depending on how tangled your departments are, this may be a huge challenge. But the goal is to get your team's task list into priority order. And the simpler it is, the better. I've experienced ticket priorities, and business values, and google docs, and all sorts of meetings that, when all combined, convolute any sense of priority whatsoever. This is how my team does it: we order the tasks from top to bottom. Whatever is on top has to be done first. Whatever is on bottom has to wait for the stuff on top. Every two weeks, we refresh the list. For you it might be every week, or every month. But a clearly prioritized list will keep everyone laser focused on the most important goals, and you will see the results immediately.
4) Gather ideas from retrospective meetings. I think retrospective meetings or debriefings are neglected way too often. We work and work and work, finish things, then press on to more work. And the argument is, "We don't have time to do a retro. That's valuable time we can spend getting more stuff done!" But... that's like owning a car and saying, "I don't take my car to the shop for checkups because I don't have time!"... until something goes wrong and you're forced to figure out what happened afterwards. Good retrospective meetings will help prevent problems, and actually boost your team's effectiveness. Here are some guidelines for running productive retros:
Having these meetings may feel like a timesink, but ultimately it will push everyone to work more smoothly and more efficiently.
5) Set a rest day for self-enrichment. Because our team became so focused on high priority tasks, we found that seemingly "less important" items would fall off the map. Things like:
Aren't these all the things that we all neglect, but always say, "I wish I could find the time to do these things." Well, if you can, just declare a day for it. We call ours a "Sprint Sabbath", and have it every other week. If the retrospective meeting I mentioned about earlier is to grow your team, think of this rest day as a way to grow the individuals. Sure, sometimes our rest day sometimes gets pushed around by high priority deadlines or emergencies, but we still look forward to it because it helps the team refresh and restart before more projects come down the pipeline.
One step at a time Again, these are components that have worked well for us so far, independent of any methodology (though it may look suspiciously "agile"). But at the root, agile or not, I think these will all apply well to most any team and context. If you are already doing many of these things, then that's awesome! But if you aren't doing these things and would like to give them a try, then I'd recommend applying gradually, one step at a time starting from #1 down to #5. Feel free to comment with any questions or thoughts.