What Defines a Productive Team?

Team Productivity is a measurement of the tasks completed with a minimum threshold of quality in a certain period of time. Productivity helps us understand how effective a process is in using resources and how smoothly it can function. It also entails how all the team members can increase their output by using the required tools needed to finish their tasks efficiently.

Team productivity is different than individual productivity as it focuses on holistic output rather than individual output. Focusing on this can help improve outcome-based metrics like customer satisfaction, overall cost, turnaround time, quality etc. rather than focusing on non-outcome-based.

Enhanced team productivity can enable lower costs, better quality and turnaround time. In an era where organizations seek for competitive advantages, team productivity is a key tool, especially in services-based organization where cost, speed and quality are the primary differentiators.

A productive team constitutes of the below elements:

1. One of the best methods to gauge their productivity and success is by setting goals that are focused on results.
2. Sharing knowledge, accomplishments and failures helps the team grow: The team should be encouraged to share their knowledge to help others to better individual accomplishments.
3. Open communication entails the team being free to discuss and exchange ideas, plans, suggestions for improvement, concerns, and issues.

How can productivity be influenced/improved?

Some key interventions to improve team productivity:

1. Team Training: Training team members on skills keeping in mind requirement of the project/tasks.
2. Manager Training: Training of leaders which empowers them to motivate and encourage team members and build stronger teams.
3. Team environment: Building stronger team dynamics by defining goals, role clarity, relationship and network building and encouraging inter-team harmony and engagement.
4. Process Improvement: Simplifying process steps, bureaucracy, complexity and elimination of non-value adding activities.
5. Productivity Tools: Use of tools and techniques that helps measure productivity and empowers team for better productivity by focusing on core work and eliminating distractions.

Before implementing interventions, it is important to gather information and context. Details on individual competencies/skills, current output and bottlenecks, productivity blockers, work patterns etc. Investing in organizational workforce analytics tool which helps in discovery and analysis of work patterns can prove beneficial. Such tools can help in baselining and benchmarking, thus making the interventions measurable and more effective.