How to Manage Your Team – Properly!
Getting the most out of a team is the life blood and primary purpose of managers and leaders across all businesses. It’s about giving individuals the tools to do a good job while providing an environment that encourages and promotes innovation and productivity.
Get it right and you have a team to be proud of. Get it wrong and you could be facing a constant uphill struggle to meet targets as you struggle to get the most out of the people around you. According to The Entrepreneur:
“Being an effective manager is about more than just driving your employees to work harder — or more efficiently. Forcing employees to work a certain way can breed resentment, even disloyalty, while being too soft can lead to bad habits, laziness or boredom.”
Great teams have common characteristics. Bringing these into your management practice can make a huge difference to performance and productivity.
- Make It Social
Most businesses will agree that when staff get on well together their productivity is improved. Adding a social dimension to the work environment can deliver a host of benefits, helping individuals to get to know each other better, allowing everyone to speak confidently and plainly about the issues at hand and promoting an environment where collaboration is the norm rather than the exception.
It includes managers socialising with members of their team rather than standing aloof so that they are visible and, perhaps more importantly, approachable.
- Recruitment and Training
It’s often said that diverse workforces can operate more productively than those that only bring in certain demographics or have strict recruitment procedures. Teams made up from a rich array of talent have a lot more to draw from and can cope with serious challenges.
Giving existing employees the right opportunities to progress within the group or team also makes a big difference. This can mean ensuring people have the right training opportunities to develop their careers as well as giving individuals the confidence to apply for new positions.
- Introducing Gamification
Many businesses are starting to introduce a game style mentality to help improve productivity. Creating a little competition as a way to achieve status or rewards can certainly energise staff if managed properly. Gamification can also be a useful tool if you are trying to train employees or provide them with online courses or modules.
- Managing Workloads
It can often seem that everyone is overworked or having difficulty keeping up with the pace of things, especially in a busy, under pressure team. Helping staff to organise their workloads better can reduce the amount of stress they feel and ensure they keep a healthy work-life balance. Agreeing goals and how these are to be reached needs to consider individual abilities and is not a one size fits all exercise.
- Introduce Innovation
Teams generally thrive on new things and bringing innovation into the workplace not only makes people feel excited but ensures your team is always looking for ways to do things better. Involving your staff in new practice has a number of benefits. Firstly, it makes them feel worthwhile. Secondly, it takes pressure of management to continually come up with changes and developments that can improve productivity and performance.
If you’re a manager, these are not the only options open to you when trying to get the best out of your teams. Greater empowerment and a willingness to think outside the box are key in creating an atmosphere where individuals can thrive and develop their careers. The good managers are always on the lookout for positive changes that make a difference to performance.
