Building Productivity Into Your Team.
In our final episode of the year, we’re looking at how to improve the productivity of a team. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 258 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 258 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Over the last year or so, I’ve received a number of questions related to helping a team improve their overall productivity. Now, this is a difficult question to answer because each individual team member will be motivated by different things and each person will have a unique approach to getting their work done. Motivation is a key part to individual productivity. If you are not motivated by your work and you see it only as a way to pay the bills, more fulfilling motives such as ownership of a project or task, developing your skills and helping people solve problems don’t feature in an individual’s mindset. That said, it is possible to build a highly productive team that has clear outcomes each day and week and at the same time builds ownership, camaraderie and a strong team work ethic. And that is what we will be looking at today. So, with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Tony. Tony asks, Hi Carl, I manage a team of eight people and we are responsible to sales and the initial after sales programme following delivery of out product. The problem I am having is keeping my team focused on what we are trying to accomplish. They often get distracted by low value tasks that means we often fall behind on our plan. Do you have any advice on helping teams be more focused? Hi Tony, thank you for your question. As I mentioned in the introduction, working with a team of people has its own challenges when it comes to productivity but there are a few things you can do that will enhance you teams overall productivity. The first is clear communication. Often what happens within a team is there is poor communication on the results that the team is expected to accomplish. At the beginning of a year or a quarter, team leaders are usually reluctant to talk about what the team’s targets are. Managers are quite happy to discuss individual targets with employees, but rarely talk about the group target. The problem here is you encourage team members to focus on their individual targets and the team’s. What you want to be doing is ensuring that the team as a whole knows the target so that they can work together to achieve that team goal. I remember when I was selling cars in the early 1990s, there were three of us in the new car sales team, plus a sales manager. Claire, Bob and myself. Claire was an outstanding sales person. She was focused, aggressive (in a positive way) and could pull sales out of nowhere. Bob on the other hand was slower. He was patient and gentler, yet he had an enormous amount of experience and consistently brought ink the sales. Me? I was somewhere in the middle. Each month out team’s target was to sell 35 cars. Now, traditionally, that number would be divided between the three of us equally, but while Claire rarely missed her targets, Bob and myself struggled to hit the target. Yet, our sales manager, David, realised that the important target was the 35 cars. Not that his three sales people sold twelve cars each per month. If we had focused on the individual numbers, Claire would have slowed down in the forth week of the month,