How to Preserve Your Team’s Productivity in An Always-On World
Modern teams are diverse and dispersed, hyper-connected, cross-departmental, and always-on. They’re supported by a range of communication and team collaboration tools including SMS, team chat applications, document sharing platforms, email, social media, and video and voice communications.?
These tools help remote, in-office and hybrid teams work together. But using all these channels comes at a cost. Multiple communication channels bring with them multiple notifications and reminders.?
Do we silence the chirps and risk missing an urgent message??
Can we safely forget about checking our messages to engage in focused work??
Do we allow ourselves to engage in focused work?
The apps that enable us to share our best ideas, may be preventing us from developing them.
Time management is broken, time management is dead... the flip side of that is to start thinking about the idea of attention management. Rather than thinking about how we manage our time, think about attention as being the most precious resource we have.
~ Graham Allcott, How to be a Productivity Ninja, Talks at Google
How can you harness your distributed team’s attention to maintain productivity amidst the noise??
Use the following tips to preserve your team’s productivity and support their focused work.?
Provide clarity through centralized, task-focused communications?
Effective use of our time begins with a clear understanding of our goals.?
As individuals, this means that we understand what it is that we want to achieve before we decide upon the tasks necessary to achieve it.?
As a manager, one of your primary roles is to provide this clarity for your team—to bring them into alignment with regard not only to the sought after results of their tasks but with regard to each task itself.?
What should they do??
When should they do it??
What are the tools and collaborations they need to complete it??
Where should they direct their attention??
Achieving this alignment requires communication, but not just any communication.?
To keep your team energized and on track, the information they need should be easy to locate, understand, and parse.?
For example, instead of asking your team to spend time each day reviewing old email threads for guidance, filtering through multi-step progression in project management apps, or trying to find messages applicable to their task in the endless scroll of team chat apps, use an app that is intensely task-focused and gathers essential details like who, what, where, and when in a single location.?
The average company loses more than 20% of its productive capacity...to what we call “organizational drag,” the structures and processes that consume valuable time and prevent people from getting things done.?
~Michael Mankins, Bain & Company, Great Companies Obsess Over Productivity, Not Efficiency
Remove organizational drag by simplifying task-related communications so your team can focus on what matters.?
Prioritize tasks to eliminate decision paralysis and reduce cognitive fatigue?
Making decisions is a costly endeavor from a cognitive standpoint. When faced with too many choices, we can experience what is known as decision paralysis. Each variable adds to the cognitive load that the decider must bear.?
You can literally wear yourself out trying to decide what to do before you’ve done anything.?
If your team starts each day asking themselves, “Which of my tasks should I complete first?” or “What task should I perform next?” they are wasting valuable cognitive energy that could be used for deep work.?
Preserve your team’s mental energies by investing time upfront to prioritize what needs to be done by each team member each week and providing your team with daily assignments (and updates) that include only what they need to know to progress the project to the next step.??
Prioritizing tasks and creating daily, detailed to-do lists that highlight just those tasks that are of highest value reduces the cognitive effort people have to invest in getting started.?
Instead, they can “hit the ground running” and you can ensure that everyone’s energy is invested in those tasks that will have the greatest impact in achieving team objectives.?
How should you choose what needs to be done??
Use systems such as Dr. Steven Covey’s Time Management Matrix for prioritizing tasks to map your priorities.?
Of course, understanding the big picture is important for team cohesion, so you don’t want to cut off all non-task related communication. You can, however, reserve these zoomed out discussions for initial alignment meetings and updates.?
And, because not every decision can be anticipated, your team should feel empowered to make decisions ad hoc. Developing strong prioritization skills as a team will improve their ability to make those critical decisions at the moment.?
Set team communication expectations?
In How to increase your productivity at work, workplace productivity coach, Dr. Melissa Gratias, observes that distractions at work can be self-imposed or environmentally imposed.?
Self-imposed distractions include enabling notifications, checking our emails too frequently, or keeping multiple tabs open on our computers even when they aren’t relevant to our current task.?
Environmentally imposed distractions include attending meetings, getting unexpected visits from co-workers, and receiving off-topic Slack messages or unnecessary emails that overload our communication channels without adding value.?
As a manager, you have the power to help your team reduce both kinds of distractions.
Protect your team members’ time by establishing guidelines and expectations for how they should communicate with one another.?
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Consider the following questions as you create a set of guidelines for your team:?
If your staff know that emails can go unanswered for an hour or two and that important messages won’t get lost in the fog of Slack, they will be more comfortable turning off their notifications and engaging in focused work.?
And, when you create a reliable system of accountability and follow-up, each team member can confidently hand off tasks to colleagues and check them off their mental to-do lists.?
Do we need to talk about that now?
According to Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trends Index: Annual Report, 68% of people say they don’t have enough uninterrupted time to do focused work during their day. Sixty-two percent of workers surveyed say they spend too much time searching for needed information.?
But the number one cause of lost productivity according to survey respondents is meetings. Both too many meetings and meeting inefficiency make the list of top 5 productivity drags.?
Provide your team with the right communication and collaboration tools for the job
Emails and text messages allow us to stay connected with our teams. But these communication formats also consume our mental energy. As we wait for a reply, we are in a state of communication-limbo.?
Did the recipient receive the message??
Was the communication clear? When will I hear back??
These modes of communication can also rapidly devolve into a mass of separate discussions, broken threads, and cross-chatter that prevents the very clarity we need to perform tasks effectively.?
We can easily find ourselves side-tracked and off task. Using instant messages can reduce our wait time but not the risks of confusion and distraction.?
Microsoft’s analysis of workers’ time spent in the Microsoft 365 environment during a 28-day period in March 2023, found that people spent 15% of their time handling emails and another 23% of their workday in meetings.?
A 2023 Harris Poll sponsored by Grammarly found that workplace written communications increased by 7% year over year. Survey respondents reported spending 14% more time responding to written communications in 2023 than in 2022. Business leaders also reported that written communications were 12% less effective in 2023.??
Is synchronous communication a solution to inefficient exchanges??
Voice and video discussion’s real-time features can be both positive and negative.?
Participants get immediate answers but they also have to sync their schedules with every other participant to join the conversation.?
So, what is a better option for team collaboration? In many situations, a task-focused app that allows team members to communicate asynchronously with each stakeholder without getting lost in a maze of unrelated conversations is the best choice.?
As an additional benefit, choosing the right app for the job will make your team more aware of the need for clarity and focus.The format and structure of most task-focused applications encourages concise communication.?
What about when you want or need to use email or a team chat application such as Slack, to coordinate with teammates??
Try some of the tips listed below to minimize complications.
Protect your team member’s prime time for work that matters?
Remember that extra hour a day of deep work I asked you to imagine earlier??
Now, imagine what an extra hour a day of deep, focused work from each of your team members performing at their peak could do for your organization.?
You can empower your team members to take advantage of their brain’s best hours of operation with just a few simple steps.?
Very few people are capable of performing at peak levels throughout their entire day. Our physical and mental energies vary.?
Improve your team’s productivity by preserving the hours of the day in which they perform at their best for their toughest work.?
For most of your team, this will mean keeping their morning calendars clear, according to Graham Alcott. Allcott recommends that we closely guard this time by turning off notifications and other distractions and hanging up a virtual “do not disturb” sign.?
But there’s an exception for every rule.?
Thomas Oppong, author of Working in the Gig Economy, suggests identifying the times of day when you’re super productive or hyper creative and saving your “most important tasks (MITs)” for those times. Using this strategy, you get more work done and better outputs.??
What can you do as a manager to safeguard your team’s best moments of the day??
Talk to your team members, learn their rhythms and give them flexibility in choosing when they’ll disconnect from the hive and focus on getting stuff done.?
Then, assuming your team is most productive during their morning hours, move team meetings to afternoons. When you have to schedule a meeting during the morning hours, choose a time close to the start of the workday rather than interrupting people’s progress with a mid-morning meetup.?
Next, set aside several “do not disturb” hours for your team each week.?
These off-limits hours can be the same for your entire team or you can allow each team member to choose their own best hours. During these time periods, allow team members to close their doors, disconnect from their digital world, and focus on just one thing.?
If someone from the group needs to be available at all times, work out a system of coverage so that each person has a chance to spend several hours each week in uninterrupted work, suggests Allcott.?
Finally, work closely with each of your team members to identify the goals and expected outcomes of their focused work periods. Make sure that you have agreed upon tasks that can be completed or progressed during the allocated time and that they have all the tools and information they need. Then, track their progress.?
You and your team may be surprised at what you can accomplish when you make preserving their peak hours a top priority.