5 Low-Budget Ways to Skyrocket Your Team’s Productivity in 2023

Helping your team be more productive doesn’t have to be a pricy process. You can achieve it by planning, thinking ahead, and communicating. In this article, we’ll give you a guide on 5 tips that will help you skyrocket your team’s productivity.

However, you must understand that this isn’t a one-time thing. If you want a productive team that reaches its goals on time, you’ll need to continually work on it. 

Optimise meetings

If your team is leaving your weekly meetings feeling defeated, it’s time for a change. With reports showing that employees spend 87 hours per month on meetings, which leads to $37 billion in lost revenue yearly, it’s easy to see why you need to make sure your meetings are short and productive. 

Start off by planning out your meetings. Once you start doing this, you’ll be able to distinguish between topics that need to be discussed in a meeting and ones that could be just an email. 

That’s the first and most important step in optimizing your meetings. Once you do that, we advise you to create a structure that every meeting should follow. What will be said in the beginning (is there a need for an ice-breaker question or anything similar), should you prepare visual aids and how much time you’ll have in the end to answer any questions? 

Along the way, you’ll easily figure out who exactly needs to be present for each meeting and how you want them to participate.

There is no need to include people who aren’t working on the project you’re discussing. Make sure that before the meeting even starts, you know exactly who needs to be present and what you’ll talk about. 

Lastly, try to make your meetings as short as possible. There is no need to lose out hours of work every week. 

Rethink your onboarding process

If you thought your onboarding process stops after a month, you’re wrong. The onboarding process should never stop. 

What we mean by this is, you should continually invest in the growth of your employees. That will definitely increase their productivity levels since they will feel appreciated and important. 

You should continually check in and provide educational opportunities for your employees. If you want your sales team to sell more, your marketing team to bring in more leads and so on, you need to organize workshops. 

This could easily and cheaply be done with Udemy courses. Ask your team for recommendations and find the courses you think would provide you with the best ROI.

The more effort you put into your team members, the better results they’ll achieve. 

Schedule your days ahead

If your team is waking up not knowing what their work day is going to look like, their productivity levels will be affected. 

Seeing how we’re most productive in the morning, it makes sense to plan your days ahead and use the morning hours to complete the most important tasks. Otherwise, your team will spend their mornings organizing their days and wasting time on things that could and should be automated. 

Find the best scheduling/organizing tool for your team – Google Calendar, Asana, Jira, whatever works and make sure everyone schedules their days ahead. That way, they won’t be wasting time, while they’re most productive. 

To go even further, we recommend you limit the time that is spent on checking email. If you only check your email twice a day, you can better focus on other tasks. Don’t spread yourself too thin by working on multiple tasks at once. 

Focus on one thing at a time

The best way to be productive is to only focus on one thing at a time. If your focus is scattered on multiple tasks at once, you’ll have trouble finishing anything, and the quality of your output will be affected. 

Make sure your team knows when to communicate with each other and when to leave their coworkers to work in peace. This could be done with Slack statuses, or even with a company-wide mandate that forbids any communication and meetings before 10 or 11 am. 

Improve work-life balance

Seeing how remote work became the norm, it’s important to set boundaries for your employees. Even though flexible work hours are great, some employees fall into the trap of working all day long, because they break up their work with too many breaks. 

If you offer remote positions, make sure to help your employees adjust. Explain to them how they should set up their days, give them tips on meeting their deadlines and help them with any issues they may encounter. 

Even if you work exclusively out of the office, there are ways you can help improve your employees’ work-life balance. 

Put a limit on after-work activities and make sure that your team buildings are organized during work hours. You can’t expect your employees to spend their free time engaging in work-based activities. 

Work on communication

Communication is the key to a great team. The only way your team can be proficient is if everything is communicated to them in a clear and timely manner. Otherwise, your employees will lose time making changes to their projects when the whole thing could have been avoided with open communication. 

Help them by finding the best communication tools. Figure out what will be disclosed via Slack and what should be left to email. Secondly, figure out when to utilize asynchronous communication. 

It refers to messages that don’t need to be answered right away. That way, your team isn’t interrupted while they’re focusing on other tasks.

Key Takeaways

Improving your team’s productivity shouldn’t be a hard task. You can easily do it by following our guide. It works for different industries as well as different characters. However, it’s important to consider the individuality of your team members. 

Make sure to ask them for input and share any new strategies before you start working on them. Once you get started with tips on raising your team’s productivity, you’ll pick up things along the way that will help you further your efforts.