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Turn Your Employees Into A Super Productivity Team

employees and productivityIf you want to motivate your team of employees to be the best workers out there, then you’ve come to the right place. But don’t stop here, we will give you advice, then it is up to you to incorporate it into daily inner-office habits. Here are some of the many important factors that come into play.

Train Your Employees

Your business will not just run itself. It takes people and those individuals form teams. You don’t want these individuals and teams just guessing what to do, right? It is so important to train your employees and take great pride while doing so. Teach them the right way you want them to do business and lead them by showing them how it is done – and also what to do when they make mistakes to avoid disasters. You might feel as though you will lose a bunch of time, but it will benefit you in the end. It will also benefit your interviewing skills for employees and teams. Statistically, employees will stay longer at a job if they have been trained correctly in the first place.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

You can avoid a lot of unnecessary anger on both sides of the fence if you communicate from the start. And I mean from the absolute start. Before you even hire a potential candidate, explain to them exactly what you expect and be honest about what kind of guidelines there are. Nobody likes surprises. Once hired, communicate again what was discussed prior to hiring. You might feel like a broken record, but communication is better than lack thereof. Don’t assume employees understand backend payroll and don’t be passive aggressive. Say what you need to say and be very clear.

Encourage Employees

Believe it or not, you are the one who can and should do this. Be open to discussion with your employees. Hear what they have to say; their concerns, struggles, obstacles, and ideas. You might see some real talent and fantastic ideas early on if you are willing. On the flip side, you might see issues, but all will have an easier time resolving these issues if they are caught early in the game.

Super-fly The Office

Nobody wants to be uncomfortable at work. Do your best to make your Company office comfy and cozy and not some cubicle hell. Some more progressive companies use exercise balls health conscious so employees can still feel active on the job.
Never underestimate the value of comfort to your employees in a workplace!
When it comes to running a seamless, fluid department, team building is critical. The more proficient your team works together, the better your company results will often be. But team building is easier said than done. It truly isn’t as simple as having a few team members stand up and say a few “surprises” about themselves. No one builds an employee team after hearing that Katie likes to eat raw onions on her Doritos. That’s just gross, anyways. Additionally, team building can go very wrong if it isn’t carried out correctly.
One of the big issues with team building is that they can often cause people to feel left out, or feel only included by specific team members. This is often the result of team building exercises which pair coworkers up through random reasoning. An example would be team building at an Escape Rooms which typically allow for up to four co-workers to find their way out of mystery rooms. A recent study showed how detrimental team building can be on a team. Yep, that’s a study showing that team building can suck. Who would have thought?
The “left out feeling,” as cited above, can also lead team members to favor other team members and generally feel more comfortable with them. It can cause employees to respect other employees more.
The study showed that team building exercises can cause employees to be more trusting of employees they participated in the team-building exercises with. This can cause all types of breakdowns in an office where trusting other coworkers to complete foundation tasks is essential. Additionally, the study found that biases were generated by team members who worked with other team members in exercises.
Overall, it sure sounds like an inclusion issue to me. That, of course, might well be a millennial issue in and of itself.
 

So how can you avoid these team-building pitfalls?

Not easily, it seems. Booking an escape room is sure easy. Maybe the idea is to mix things up. In other words, do a full-on group team-building exercise along with a segregated style. For example, do the escape room, but follow that up with a happy hour that gets the group together and maybe put up some trivia that comes with prizes. Make the group feel as though they are all one big team, rather than a number of unique sectors.
You could completely avoid any of the segregated style events and make sure that all team building activities keep the group together. If you make that a goal and a policy, you can inevitably prevent any biases.
The other option is to make sure the groups are switched up through the duration of the team-building exercises. In the example of the escape rooms, that’s easier said than done. You would likely anger employees if they had to spend an entire day at an escape room just to accommodate switching team members. But things such as game night or trivia or a number of other activities could lend themselves nicely to rotating team members.
Promoting things like icebreakers and personal trivia is super inclusive and can be fun. In this way, people rotate and guess answers that each employee has put down to a given question. This also allows employees to get to know everyone in some capacity. They have to relate to each person on some level.

Sometimes with employees, just keep it simple.

I’ve said this often, sometimes, it doesn’t need to be overly complex. Just having a happy hour, or a luncheon, and allowing people to migrate to one another and talk can do a lot for a company. Some employees get anxiety over team building exercises. They want to come in and do their job with the stress of having to interact with other people on a social level. It is important that we are sensitive to such employee needs. It seems these days companies are extremely sensitive to a variety of things, just not that. An introverted employee might not need team building to serve the company in a beneficial manner.
Something like a happy hour or a day at a baseball game allows them to interact in the environment how they choose to. It allows them to normalize things. They aren’t forced to try to guess trivia questions about other employees or help figure out if a key located under an escape room’s prop bed.
I recall consulting a company last year that when asked what their biggest complaint was, many of them cited that the team building activities the company forced them to participate in caused them stress. That’s the very effect you are looking for when it comes to your employees and departments. So it is always recommended that you proceed with caution in this area. Don’t overdo it or make it a stressful endeavor.

Poll your employees

Ever thought about just asking your employees what type of team building activities they’d be interested? This is a great way to gain insights into what they enjoy and what they are comfortable with. It may also serve to make them feel involved in the process which may soften them up to activities they might not have enjoyed prior.
In the end, don’t force the issue. Team building can be as tragic as it can be great. Know your people and go with your gut. If team building feels wrong to you, it probably is.
The term, teamwork, often refers to teaching small children how to behave and collaborate with other children in social situations. However, in the adult world, teamwork is a very important skill to have. Teamwork refers to the ability of a group of people to collaborate with a diverse array of individuals in order to produce one ideal product. Collaboration and teamwork are becoming more common in day-to-day life. Healthcare professionals need to collaborate in order to produce the best solution for an ill patient; business partners need to collaborate with each other in order to produce and market their product; teachers need to collaborate with the rest of the school administrators, children, and parents in order to give the best education to each child. There are copious amounts of examples in which teamwork is essential to a functioning society.
Researchers have dedicated an extensive amount of time in order to research the benefits of teamwork in the business setting. In the study, Teamwork and High-Performance Work Organization, a team of researchers concluded that teamwork increases productivity and efficacy of a company through a variety of means. On the average, incorporation of teamwork into the workplace empowered employees and made them feel more autonomous. This type of autonomous power that employees expressed correlated with their satisfaction with the company. On average, employees who had more decision-making opportunities were more satisfied with the company. In addition, the companies with better learning environments utilized teamwork extensively. Researchers found that employees, new and old, were able to learn new skills through the use of teamwork. Finally, teamwork led to improvements in project organization. This organization then leads to increased efficacy for the company and less stress for the employees. Once again, this type of situation increases employee satisfaction in the company.
Anyone can see that teamwork is essential to the survival of any type of business, but how does one go about incorporating teamwork into their business? One simple answer is technology. Technology has become increasingly useful to every aspect of the business, so why not use it to build teamwork? The idea of using technology or software in order to increase teamwork is a relatively new concept. It is extremely useful because this type of technology allows people to work together even when they are not in the same room. The required data can be accessed through the software on any computer, at any time. This allows team-members the ability to work on their project on the go, which inevitably increases the productivity of the company, especially with payroll processing outsourcing.

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