The Essential Guide to Managing Highly Productive Service Teams
Table of Contents
For those in management positions, it’s easy to get bogged down by the interpersonal dynamics and internal processes that negatively affect your team’s performance. And rightly so. These issues can have a huge impact on your business’s ability to keep clients and maintain profitability.
But you should also focus on fostering a work environment where your team can function in a highly-productive manner.
In this article, we’ll discuss how service-based businesses can manage highly productive teams by building the right team, fostering the right workplace culture, and using the right tools for tracking employee performance.
What are the qualities of a productive team?
Before you focus on how to manage a highly productive team, it helps to understand what a highly productive team looks like—how team members behave when they are motivated, supported, and aligned with company goals.
It’s crucial that you understand this because, as a team consolidates, habits form quickly and can be difficult to change down the road. That’s why you need to ensure that processes and guardrails are in place to shape team habits and dynamics in a productive manner.
Some qualities exhibited by highly productive teams are listed below.
Collaborative: Successful teams feel confident sharing ideas, providing and accepting feedback, asking questions and expressing concerns to both peers and management on a regular basis.
Aligned: Each member of a productive team understands their own individual roles and responsibilities, their fellow team members’ roles and responsibilities, and how everyone’s goals align with the financial objectives of the overall business.
Goal-oriented: Regularly setting and updating short-term, result-oriented goals is essential to highly effective and productive teams. These short-term goals connect directly to more substantial individual, team, and company milestones.
Curious: Highly productive teams regularly share information that empowers teammates to do their jobs more efficiently. This is particularly effective when teams have access to relevant data, insights, and other resources.
Supportive: High-performing teams regularly recognize and celebrate individual and team achievements. This can significantly boost employee satisfaction and morale, strengthen team bonds, and make the workplace a happier place to be.
Flexible: Productive teams need to adapt to new situations quickly—especially in service-based industries. Whether it’s filling in gaps for an absent employee or pivoting the scope of a new project, the ability to learn quickly and act with flexibility is crucial.
Improving Team Productivity with a Skills Gap Analysis
You can identify the skills you need to meet your business goals by conducting a skills gap analysis. A skills gap analysis is the process of determining the difference between what skills are needed to complete projects, what skills the workforce currently offers, and what skills you’re missing. You can then find ways to fill that gap, whether through team training or hiring.
With the right personnel in place, you can shift your focus from addressing skills gaps to preventing and addressing qualities that hinder team productivity.
3 team qualities to avoid
Although it’s important to find and implement the right qualities of a productive team, it’s just as important to avoid the wrong ones.
There are plenty of negative team qualities that can hamstring productivity and push overall performance in the wrong direction. Some examples of qualities your team should try to avoid include:
Hypercritical: Make it a priority to avoid unstructured and unwarranted criticism, whether it be in the form of personal attacks, unwarranted feedback, or negativity.
Researchers at Michigan State University have found that negative-minded workers are more likely to become mentally fatigued and defensive, experiencing a drop-off in productivity.
Rigid: A rigid mindset, for both individuals and teams, makes it challenging to implement procedural and cultural changes in the workplace. This not only makes work less enjoyable, but it also hinders personal and professional development and team performance.
Micromanaging: Improving productivity through micromanagement is a thoroughly debunked myth. If managers focus too much on the details of daily operations, they may miss the broader picture and fail to address team and department-level challenges as they arise.
Micromanagement also causes stress among team members and can erode team morale, both of which hinder productivity.
While it can be difficult to identify the team qualities that are helping versus hindering your overall performance, there are procedures and supporting tools you can implement to identify the current productivity and effectiveness of your team.
How to measure productivity
For businesses in PR, finance, architecture, and other service-based industries, measuring team performance is essential to firm longevity and success.
Tracking billable hours, utilization rates, and other metrics against projects can highlight areas where improvement is needed or current strengths to build off. Analyzing this data on both an individual and team level gives another layer of context into the dynamics of team performance.
If you want to improve team productivity while also monitoring progress, follow these three steps:
Step 1: Select the right metrics
Business metrics are primarily used to communicate an organization’s progress toward both long- and short-term goals. The correct metrics help team members become more productive because they can clarify how an individual’s actions contribute to organizational outcomes.
Step 2: Set achievable targets based on corporate goals
Identify the targets your team wants to achieve and create step-by-step goals with dependencies, a clear order, and direct ties to corporate goals. This way, you can measure progress more effectively on big projects and keep your team accountable.
Step 3:Report on progress frequently
Incorporating evaluation processes can help you identify the top performers’ good work and efforts. When tasks are completed properly, you will be able to provide positive reinforcements. It is crucial to reinforce good performance and morale at work.
How to improve team performance
Now that you have a better understanding of productive teams and how to monitor them, it’s time for you to drive these behaviors in your own company.
There are 10 steps to cultivating a high-performing team, which are separated into 3 main categories:
- Building your team
- Choosing the right tools for tracking and measurement
- Fostering the right workplace culture.
Build your team
Start with Your Team’s Purpose
In addition to selecting qualified candidates, you need to make sure everyone is clear on the company’s overall targets and how each role contributes to reaching those targets. Constantly reiterating the purpose of your team will help maintain alignment between individual and company goals.
Delegate Tasks
Select capable leaders for each project. Outline clearly how they will take ownership and accountability for their target, and empower them to divide tasks between the other members of the team.
Schedule Necessary Training
Wherever necessary, support staff in developing the skills that will help them thrive professionally, and in a team environment, while pursuing their targets.
Choose the right tools to track employee performance
Choose the Right Tools
Select a time tracking tool that will help keep your team accountable and collaborative with features like status updates and task-specific notes. This helps clarify roles and makes the decision process more transparent for the entire team.
Track & measure
Some of the top time tracking tools give you a wealth of actionable, real-time data with which to inform employee performance reports. You can then provide individual and group feedback proactively, while simultaneously assessing the efficiency of project development.
Check In Regularly
Ensure you meet with project leaders regularly to share feedback and talk about their performance. Use employee utilization reports and make sure they do the same with their teams. This gives managers and direct reports uninterrupted time to discuss projects, review performance, and remove blockers.
Foster the right workplace culture
Foster a Culture of Trust
When possible, consult the team about decisions relevant to projects and targets. Giving everyone a chance to engage and share feedback shows that you, and the company, trust their abilities and judgment.
Create Psychological Safety
Create a psychologically-safe environment by maintaining trust levels and discouraging excessive criticism, value judgments, and negative feedback. When everyone feels comfortable and encourages a sense of belonging, they are more likely to share ideas with one another and spark creativity.
Connect on Non-work Topics
Setting aside dedicated time to connect on topics unrelated to work—from discussions around interests, hobbies, and personal aspirations to team-building exercises—helps cement relationships and a sense that the team is more than just a work unit.
Cultivate a Culture of Appreciation & Authenticity
Take time to share appreciation for the efforts and successes of your team members, and encourage them to do the same. Making the feedback as genuine and authentic as possible will increase the impact of these efforts.
Unlock a New Level of Team Productivity with ClickTime
Understanding how service teams become highly productive can help you foster success at your own firm. However, it’s difficult to maintain levels of high performance without putting the proper processes and systems in place.
That’s why it’s critical that you and the rest of your management team have a tool that helps you track employee performance. ClickTime’s employee time-tracking, project management, and reporting features make it easier to foster and maintain the productivity of your teams, so you can satisfy clients and improve profitability.
Learn more about tracking employee performance with ClickTime
