How To Improve Your Team's Productivity

10 May 2021 - Podcast 182 This week, how can you improve the productivity of your team or company? That’s the question I am answering this week.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Email Mastery 2021 Course Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook More about the Time Sector System 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   Script Episode 182 Hello and welcome to episode 182 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. This podcast and many others tend to focus on the individual rather than the group and this is likely because changing an individual’s habits can be easier than trying to change a group’s habits. But that does not mean changing the way a group operates is impossible. With leadership and a commitment from the group as a whole, significant positive changes can be made and very quickly.  So that is what I shall be addressing this week.  Now, before we dive into the answer, I’d like to urge you to download a copy of my free Areas of Focus workbook. The cornerstone of all effective time management and productivity systems is knowing what is important to you. If you do not know what is important to you, you will soon find yourself serving the interests of other people and their interests are never going to be fulfilling to you.  Once you know what is important, you can then build these areas of your life into your daily, weekly, and monthly tasks ensuring that you are bringing balance into your life. Time spent on your relationships and family, your career, your health, wealth, experiences and overall purpose are a lot more important than most people realise. That balance gives you the sense of freedom and wellbeing that so many people lack in their lives today. The download is free and I will not be asking you for your email address or any personal information. I just want you to discover what is important to you so you can build your life around what you want, and not what other people want.  So if you have not done so already, head over to my downloads page on my website—carlpullein.com and start working your way through it. Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question:  This week’s question comes from Mark. Mark asks, Hi Carl, I manage a team of sixteen people and we are all struggling to stay on top of the work handed down to us from head office. There’s a mixture of customer support, admin tasks and sales and it is just piling up and we don’t seem to be getting anywhere close to clearing our backlog. Do you have any productivity tips for teams that might help?  Hi Mark, thank you for your question and for reminding me that productivity is not only about the individual, but also about the team.  To answer your question directly, yes there are and there are quite a lot of them.  First up we need to deal with communication. How does your team communicate with each other? With the seismic changes in the way we work that has happened over the last year, one of the key areas that have a profound impact on a team’s productivity is in the way the team communicates.  One of the issues I’ve come across numerous times is the number of channels a team can communicate. There is the phone, email and instant messaging of course, but over the last twelve months, there have been additional channels added. Slack, Microsoft Teams and even messaging within project management software such as Salesforce and Trello.  That’s a lot of communication channels a team member needs to navigate and with so many channels to check there is going to be a time cost