How to Take Your Team's Performance to the Next Level

Upgrade your comms systems

 If your team members don’t have access to the best day-to-day comms systems, they’re unlikely ever to achieve their full collaborative potential. To this end, think about the basics to ensure they’re serving you as well as possible.

Consider bringing on board an email platform that incorporates a collaborative inbox specifically designed to allow for multiple conversations. This means that colleagues can discuss, brainstorm, and share ideas without the annoying screen clutter of traditional email threads – so the workflow will continue flowing!

Look for a platform that not only promotes excellent team collaboration in-house but also makes it easy for outside clients or organizations to get involved and join the conversation as necessary. Ideally, your chosen client should also include a priority inbox allowing employees to focus on important tasks without the constant interruption of non-urgent emails and notifications pinging in. This is a simple but extremely effective way to boost team performance and productivity.

Get really clear on goals

It’s vital to make sure that every member of your team understands the business’s goals and vision in order to stay aligned with them and work towards them. You may be surprised at just how many enterprises recruit new members of staff and neglect to properly communicate the business’s overarching values, ethos, and mission.

As well as being aware of the company’s overall goals, your team should be really clear on its own goals and purpose, how these can best be met, and how success will be measured going forward. And, zooming in still further, make sure that every individual member of your team knows their own specific roles and responsibilities and how they feed into the goals of the entire team and, wider, the business as a whole.

These goals may shift and change over time or at different points during the year, and regular whole-team meetings are an important forum in which to discuss these and ensure everyone’s on board and singing from the same hymn sheet.

Create a feedback loop

 Transparency and accountability are key components in high-performing teams. These things also serve to build trust, boosting employee loyalty, motivation, and a sense of job satisfaction. 

To create a feedback loop, consider ways to get feedback as a manager from your employees rather than simply looking at means of providing feedback to each team member. Regular debriefings in which you ask staff members to leave ‘rank’ considerations at the door may feel challenging at first but are likely to be extremely appreciated by your team and could generate some high-value ideas and feedback.

Building integration into the feedback loop is vital. When designing it, consider how you’ll identify and action change as a result of the feedback you receive – this should become a standard daily or weekly routine rather than being managed on an ad-hoc or occasional basis.

Encourage taking ownership of work

One of the best ways to boost motivation and morale even further (as well as the productivity that comes with these things) is to stand back, where possible, and allow your employees to take ownership of a task or assignment. 

Doing this can be hard. It’s understandable to want to hover on the shoulders of team members, checking that everything is going well. But the benefits of encouraging ownership are many: staff will be more engaged with their work, are likely to be more creative in their approach (which can result in some unexpected and brilliant solutions), and feel more empowered, all of which are great for your business.

But how to get started? Firstly, ensure that your team has the resources and equipment they need to be successful. Next, make sure those feedback loops are in place, as we discussed above. And then, take a deep breath, assign your team a task, and step back from micromanaging. There’s a very likely chance that you’ll be delighted with the results.