If you’re dead serious about addressing your company’s productivity issues, you’re not alone. Inefficient workflows, poor collaboration between teams, and other factors can slow down your productivity, impacting your bottom line. Fortunately, with the proper process and tools, you can improve your project team’s productivity. You don’t need to spend a lot of money or employ the help of consultants. You just need to follow the proven and tested tips shared in this guide, and your productivity is bound to shoot up.
Below are four productivity tips for your project team
1. Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
Creating standard operating procedures and housing them on a platform that your team can access allows them to find answers to their questions without asking.
For example, if your team is creating a landing page and they’re wondering what size the sliders of the page should be, they can check out your company SOP to determine what your standards are for the sizes of sliders.
This allows them to move forward with their task without having to ask someone.
Without SOPs, tasks or milestones can be delayed for a day simply because the person who can answer the team member with a question isn’t present. A single day of delay can push the entire project’s completion day, so it’s important to prevent it at all costs.
Also, use videos to create SOPs when needed. Some SOPs are better off written, while others are better off as videos.
Learn how to speed up your videos, so it doesn’t cause needless delays to the person watching.
Instead of creating a three- to a four-page document describing the standards of completing a task, you might only need to create a 30-second video. If that’s the case, opt for creating the video instead.
Best practices for creating standard operating procedures:
- House your documents on cloud based platforms. That way, your team can access them whenever and wherever they are as long as they have internet access. Include SOP documents for all aspects of your operations, such as the standard process to purchase articles online.
- Add varying levels of permissions to people who can access your documents. Your writing team doesn’t need access to your accounting team’s SOPs. Make sure only relevant people have access to your documents.
2. Invest in intuitive project management platforms
Using a top-notch project management platform helps you complete your projects quicker and more efficiently since you can track your progress easily and even streamline your task handoffs.
You can set deadlines, allocate budget, set priorities, create dependencies, or even attach documents to tasks to give your employees clear instructions and limitations to the tasks they need to accomplish.
While there are countless project management tools online, ClickUp is showing to be a great platform that businesses use to collaborate.
The tool even has automation features that you can leverage to further improve your productivity.
If the platform doesn’t work for you, there are other Clickup alternatives online that are sure to fit your business dynamics.
The best benefit about using project management tools is you don’t always need to pay.
There are free project management tools that you can leverage, especially if you are just starting or your project budget is low.
Also, you can read Hootsuite: Social media management platform
Best practices for choosing project management tools:
- Visit review sites such as G2 Crowd, Capterra, etc. Pay very close attention to the negative reviews shared about the platform to make sure it doesn’t go in conflict with the must-have features you’re looking for.
- Be mindful of when the platform last added features and updates. Most project management platforms update or add features at least once a month.
- Look for a platform with exceptional customer service.
- Before getting a paid subscription, reach out to the software company and ask if they have discounts. You’ll be surprised how some of them offer well over 40% discount for their new customers.
3. Be mindful of employee scheduling
One thing you need to be mindful of when completing projects is your cost and your team’s experience.
You need to cut costs as much as possible while making sure your team’s experience running the project isn’t compromised.
Proper employee scheduling can help with both.
Overstaffing can lead to needless workforce costs while understaffing can cause delays and poor employee experience.
That’s why your employee scheduling should be spot on.
Use employee shift scheduling software to help you come up with an optimized shift schedule.
These online tools can show how much workload an employee had when their last vacation or breaks were and whether or not they are tardy or early at work.
It even helps you come up with quick replacements should your employees encounter emergencies and can’t go to work.
You can also integrate your scheduling platform with efficient HR software to harmonize attendance records with payroll, incentives, and other related aspects.
Below is a screenshot of Deputy’s platform where it’s made it easier for its users to find replacement employees.
The data you obtain from employee shift scheduling software can help you make better, smarter decisions about your employees’ shifts. Invest in one.
4. Automate as much as you can
You can accomplish more while doing less with the help of automation — from automating running your email campaigns to leveraging Artificial Intelligence or AI as your next content writer.
For example, if your team is creating software under Microsoft Azure DevOps, you can run automatic backups by using Backrightup.
The platform can run your Azure DevOps backup automatically and regularly, so you don’t need to allocate workforce hours for the task.
You can back up a couple of other things, such as repositories, wikis, work items, etc. When your backups are done automatically, you spend far less time on workforce hours.
Also, since the software does the backup, you can rest assured that it’s done on time every single time.
You can automate other aspects of your projects: notifications, content posting, email marketing, sales funnels, and reporting.
See More: Quick Guide: How to Create Engaging Content for Your Business
Automation best practices:
- Personalize whenever you have the opportunity. This tip is especially crucial when you’re using automation to engage with people. For example, if you’re using automation tools to send follow-up messages to prospective clients, you want your messages to display their names to make them feel that a real person is reaching out to them.
- Check your automation sequence regularly just to make sure it’s running without a hitch.
Skyrocket your team’s productivity now
Improving your project team’s productivity doesn’t have to be rocket science. Just by using the tips shared in this guide, you can drastically improve your productivity.
Of course, as your productivity improves, the quicker your projects are completed, the better your team’s experience will be.
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