At its most fundamental level, you can determine team productivity by the number of assigned tasks or projects a team can complete within a specific period without sacrificing quality.
In some departments, like customer support or sales, team productivity is based on the number of conversations, tickets, and calls handled successfully within a given time.
Shortcuts:
- Why is Team Productivity So Important?
- What Slows Down Team Productivity?
- Helpful Tech: 10 Apps that Boost Team Productivity
- Free Team Productivity Tips
If the departments within a company are productive, the small business will achieve its goals in very little time — as opposed to a company with unproductive teams.
However, team productivity depends on many factors, including company culture, communication, and collaboration — which some companies lack.
Fortunately, there are tech tools that help create the necessary environment and culture to enhance team productivity.
In this piece, you’ll learn what slows down team productivity, the tools you can use to boost productivity in the workplace, and some measures you can take to ensure that your business’ productivity is optimal.
Why is Team Productivity So Important?
Optimal team productivity is what keeps a business afloat.
When teams consistently meet deadlines and provide great results for their clients and customers, the business will most likely experience a boon — both with its number of customers and monthly (or yearly) revenue.
This level of productivity helps a business build an excellent reputation and morale, so it doesn't have to do too much to convince people to buy its products or engage its services.
Optimally, team productivity increases work satisfaction by allowing employees to maximize their potential in a conducive and supportive work environment.
Not only does this reduce employee/customer churn and save the business money, but it also encourages high-quality job seekers to apply for positions within the business.
What Slows Down Team Productivity?
As a business owner, you naturally want to create a work environment that encourages optimal team productivity.
However, some factors slow your team down and lower productivity on a large scale.
Here are five of them:
- Poor communication: When employees don't communicate openly with their colleagues, they'll have difficulty understanding their roles, responsibilities, and goals.
The same applies when the manager or team lead needs to provide comprehensive feedback to team members on a project.
Poor communication can lead to clashes, misunderstandings, delays, and mistakes that negatively affect team productivity.
- Silos: Silos form when different teams in an organization don't effectively communicate, collaborate, and share data.
Working in silos means that employees or entire departments are entirely isolated from the rest of the business.
It is detrimental to team productivity because one department's work often influences a different department's work.
For example, the marketing team has to work with the product and customer service teams to create marketing assets that highlight the star features of the product and attract high-quality prospects.
When there's a silo, these teams aren't able to influence one another's work, which can lead to the creation and execution of a misplaced campaign that'll cost the company money and yield meager results.
- Unnecessary meetings: While meetings allow team members to catch up with one another and discuss the progress of projects, too many meetings can be counterproductive.
71% of senior managers feel that meetings could be more productive. And for good reason, too.
Meetings can take a lot of time, and with each passing hour, the attention and interest of attendees wane.
After a 3-hour meeting, it takes work for employees to be as devoted to their tasks and produce results.
This reduction in productivity becomes very noticeable when employees participate in multiple meetings per day (or week).
- Poor management: In organizations where managers and team leaders have a lackadaisical attitude or micromanage their employees, there's often low team productivity.
Poor management frustrates employees and demotivates them from putting their all into their work.
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- Frequent multitasking: While working on multiple tasks at once is a good way to get things done faster, it can reduce productivity in the workplace.
Doing too many things simultaneously causes employees to split their attention and focus, so they cannot complete tasks to the best of their ability.
- Stress and burnout: Organizations, especially fast-growing ones, often need more work and time to accomplish things.
It creates a stressful work environment as employees must devote more time and resources to completing work while neglecting their personal, educational, and familial concerns.
When things come to a head, employees experience burnout, which reduces concentration, efficacy, focus, and team productivity.
- Poor time management: In a fast-growing organization, employees must manage their time well to maintain productivity, which is why time management is important.
Unfortunately, many employees struggle to manage their time well, prioritize tasks, and balance their work and personal lives.
It can lead to missed deadlines, increased stress, and decreased productivity.
Helpful Tech: 10 Apps That Boost Team Productivity (& What They Do)
Productivity tools are a great way to help business teams manage projects more efficiently, streamline their workflows, and get more work done in less time.
These tools can help teams in different ways — from taking down notes and organizing a daily to-do list to automating repetitive tasks and optimizing time management.
Below are 10 of the best productivity apps that teams can use to make their processes more efficient and productive.
1. Sunsama
Sunsama is a digital daily planner that helps you manage time and achieve work-life balance by planning your day with a step-by-step routine.
In Sunsama's intuitive user interface, you can create a unified daily view by pulling tasks from project management tools like Asana and Trello.
You can also collect emails from Gmail and Outlook and organize meetings from your calendar.
You can decide how long you want to work on each task and schedule future tasks on your calendar.
Pricing: 14-day free trial. Paid plans start at $16/month, billed annually.
2. Slack
Slack is a communication and collaboration tool that makes it easy for team members to connect and work efficiently.
The app has a centralized system that allows for instant messaging, file sharing, voice and video calls, and integration with several third-party tools.
Slack has a channel-based structure allows you to categorize your team's communication or specific projects/topics into different channels.
This way, people can easily find what they're working on and which interactions they're a part of.
Employees will also be able to see what each team is working on without jumping through hoops or reading countless emails.
On the integration side, Slack seamlessly integrates with countless tools that businesses use in their processes, including Google Workspace, Zoom, Zapier, Salesforce, and even Twitter.
It allows teams to create custom workflows, automate their processes, and centralize files, data, and notifications from other tools in their tech stack.
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $7.25/month. There's the custom Enterprise Grid plan for companies that need more powerful features than the regular plans offer.
3. Asana
Asana is a project management tool that helps teams of all sizes organize work, focus on their goals, and hit their deadlines without compromising quality.
With Asana, you can create tasks, assign them to the right team member, set due dates, and stipulate the steps to execute each task.
You can also add attachments, descriptions, and subtasks to provide context for each task.
As an admin, Asana will send you notifications of any comments, task updates, and changes made by team members, which ensures that you're always aware of the progress of a project.
To streamline workflows, Asana seamlessly integrates with tools like Google Drive, Canva, Dropbox, and Slack, offering comprehensive Asana integrations.
Pricing: 30-day free trial. Paid plans start at $10.99 per user/month, billed annually.
4. ClickUp
ClickUp is a powerful task management tool with an intuitive user interface and easily navigable features.
This tool allows teams to create a visual canvas that displays all aspects of a project in one place; this helps them stay focused on their objectives.
If you're working on several projects, ClickUp allows you to customize task views and dependencies to organize and prioritize your work.
This platform supports Agile methodologies, including Kanban and Scrum, and has features like Agile dashboards, Burndown Charts, and Sprint Boards.
It also integrates with third-party MarTech tools like Slack, Figma, HubSpot, and Loom.
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $7 per member/month. There's an Enterprise plan available for businesses who need a custom plan.
5. Evernote
The days of sticking Post-its to a mirror or computer screen are over. Now, teams can take and organize notes digitally and sync them across all devices through Evernote.
This tool allows team members to access, edit, upload, and share notes and files from any device.
They can also create to-do lists, scan documents, add images, clip web pages and articles, sync their calendars, and record voice messages when they get a great idea.
Evernote's visual bulletin board allows you to filter unnecessary information to focus on essential tasks.
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $10.83/month, billed annually.
6. Notion
Notion is a comprehensive all-in-one productivity tool that allows you to take notes, organize work, collaborate with teams, and manage projects.
It is for individuals and teams of all sizes across various industries, including content creation, marketing, and software development.
Notion has a flexible and customizable workspace where you can create pages, boards, and databases to organize information that suits your processes and workflow.
You can create to-do lists, calendars, tasks, and notes and share them with other team members.
You can also work on documents and projects with your team members simultaneously, facilitating seamless collaboration and improving productivity.
Notion integrates with other business tools, including Asana, Canva, ClickUp, Figma, and GitHub.
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $8 per user/month, billed annually.
7. Zapier
Zapier is a web-based automation tool that helps business professionals automate repetitive tasks and acts as a bridge between apps.
This tool integrates with thousands of apps, including Airtable, Calendly, Gmail, Mailchimp, HubSpot, and Notion — and can be used by marketers, project managers, salespeople, developers, and the like.
Zapier allows users to create "zaps" — automated actions triggered by specific events — without needing previous coding experience.
For example, you could set up a zap that sends a tweet whenever you publish a new blog post on your website.
Or you can automatically add new leads you collect through landing pages and social media platforms to your email list. It frees up time so you can focus on more critical projects.
Zapier also allows developers to create custom applications based on a user's needs and connect them to your other software.
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $19.99/month, billed annually. There's a Company plan for organizations who want automation with robust security features and oversight capabilities.
8. Grammarly
Grammarly is an AI-based writing assistant that helps people improve their spelling, grammar, and writing style.
This tool uses complex algorithms to analyze written content and provide real-time feedback, including pointing out spelling and grammatical errors and suggesting better sentence structure.
In the realm of the best writing apps, Grammarly's premium plan offers valuable insights into writing clarity, tone of voice, and engagement, which are helpful to users who aren't native English speakers.
This tool integrates with Google Docs, Gmail, and Slack, among other tools, and various platforms, including web browsers, desktop applications, and mobile devices.
Pricing: Free plan available for individuals. 7-day free trial for Grammarly Business. The paid plans start at $15 per user/month, billed annually.
9. Calendly
Calendly is a scheduling tool that businesses of all sizes can use to automate scheduling meetings with clients, customers, and team members.
This tool syncs with your calendar and allows you to set up events and block out the times you're busy.
When someone wants to book an appointment or meeting with you, they can pick an available time in Calendly without having to go back and forth with you or submit a calendar request via email.
It frees up time for you to focus on other tasks.
A great feature Calendly has is the buffering functionality.
It allows you to set up buffer times between meetings, like a 15-minute break to regroup or stretch or a barrier for last-minute meetings.
It stops people from adding too many appointments to your schedule on short notice.
Calendly integrates with several third-party productivity tools on this list, including ClickUp, HubSpot, Notion, and Slack.
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $8 per seat/month.
10. HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one customer relationship marketing (CRM) platform that comprises inbound marketing, customer service, sales, CMS, operations, and commerce tools that help businesses attract, engage, and satisfy customers.
All these tools within one platform help businesses streamline their processes, workflows, campaigns, and communication.
HubSpot CRM organizes client/customer profiles and interactions in one repository where all team members can see what's happening.
It also gives a detailed overview of a business's operational activities through custom dashboards and metrics, which makes it easier to sync different teams and prevent the formation of data silos.
Pricing: HubSpot's pricing depends on the tool(s) you want to use. Each tool, or “Hub,” has a basic free plan available. The paid plans are as follows (billed annually):
Marketing Hub
- Starter plan starts at $18/month
- Professional plan starts at $800/month
- Enterprise plan starts at $3,600/month
Sales Hub
- Starter plan starts at $18/month
- Professional plan starts at $450/month
- Enterprise plan starts at $1,500/month
Customer Service Hub
- Starter plan starts at $18/month
- Professional plan starts at $450/month
- Enterprise plan starts at $1,200/month
CMS Hub
- Starter plan starts at $23/month
- Professional plan starts at $360/month
- Enterprise plan starts at $1,200/month
Operations Hub
- Starter plan starts at $18/month
- Professional plan starts at $720/month
- Enterprise plan starts at $2,000/month
Bonus App: ProofHub
ProofHub eliminates the need for investing in multiple tools by providing a comprehensive, all-in-one platform that streamlines project management, collaboration, and communication, saving both time and resources.
You can assign tasks, track progress, and manage performance on the centralized dashboard.
Multiple task list views provide you with different ways to track project progress and wide visibility of the project flow.
With custom field reports you get deep insights into the individual performance of various team members.
You can identify areas of improvement and forecast resources with confidence.
Integrations with Google Drive, Quickbooks, and other tools help you build a seamless and streamlined workflow.
Pricing: 14-day free trial. Paid plans start from $45 per month for unlimited users.
Free Team Productivity Tips
- Hold standup meetings
- Reward your employees
- Encourage proper communication
- Prioritize employee well-being
Apart from using productivity tools, there are other measures you can take to increase team productivity. Here are four of them:
1. Hold standup meetings
Holding multiple meetings every week takes up all your employees’ time and isn’t conducive to team productivity.
Thankfully, communication tools like Loom and Slack have enabled teams, especially remote ones, to communicate asynchronously.
While these tools eliminate unnecessary meetings, team members have to hold meetings at least once a month to connect with each other and discuss what they’re working on.
That’s where standing, or stand-up, meetings come in.
In these short meetings, different team members give an update on the work they’ve completed, the work they’re still doing, and the work they’ve yet to begin.
These meetings allow people to get different perspectives, opinions, and feedback on their work.
Here are some tips on how to properly hold standing meetings:
- Keep the meeting short. 15-20 minutes is enough time for a standing meeting.
- Create an agenda and send talking points to attendees in advance so they can come prepared and ready to engage.
- Hold the meeting at the same time on the day you have it. If you need help keeping to the schedule, let people know beforehand.
- If your team is remote, use video conferencing tools like Google Meet and Zoom to hold the meeting.
2. Reward your employees
There’s no better feeling than recognition after putting your all into a task or project.
A good team leader or manager should take the time to acknowledge and reward the effort and hard work their team members put in.
This recognition can happen during standing meetings or annual events at the company.
One thing to remember is that you should reward quality first, not quantity.
For example, say customer rep A answers 100 tickets in a month but has a 62% customer satisfaction (CSAT) score, and customer rep B answers 45 tickets in a month with a 96% CSAT score.
In this scenario, you should praise/reward customer rep B for their higher-quality work.
Not only does this highlight the importance of quality, but it also incentivizes your other employees to perform tasks with customer satisfaction in mind.
3. Encourage proper communication
To create a conducive work environment, encourage your employees to talk to one another about their work.
This way, they can get the diverse opinions, feedback, and support they need to create and execute high-quality campaigns and projects.
That said, communication shouldn’t only happen among team members but across departments.
Members of cross-functional teams, like marketing, product, sales, and customer success teams, need to be able to communicate with one another and know what’s going on in other departments at all times.
Not only does this reduce the chances of silo formation, but it also enhances team productivity.
4. Prioritize employee well-being
Employees don’t just live to fatten your company’s bottom line.
Outside the office, they are people with real lives and responsibilities, and you should create a work environment that prioritizes their well-being.
To know which approach to take, speak to your employees and have them share their personal wellness goals.
These goals will help you determine if they’d prefer fewer meetings, longer lunch breaks, meditation/yoga sessions, paid time off, or something else entirely.
When your employees share the best ways to maintain their wellness, try to do regular check-ins to help them prioritize those goals and keep them on track.
It builds accountability and team support and encourages the formation of healthy habits — all of which contribute to team productivity.
Conclusion: Boost Team Productivity One Factor at a Time
When trying to boost your team’s productivity, take things slowly.
First, identify the negative factors deterring productivity and brainstorm ways to fix them.
Be careful not to execute all your ideas simultaneously, or you’ll risk confusing and burning out your employees.
Instead, execute ideas individually and involve all your employees in the process.
With time, you’ll be able to create a work environment where employees communicate with one another, prioritize essential tasks, manage time effectively, and execute projects on time without compromising on quality.
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