Good leaders want their team to give their best and achieve maximum productivity at work. And it is in their power to help people reach their full potential.
As their leader, your team looks up to you and your influence will have a great impact over their lives. This article is meant to help you discover a few strategies that will inspire people and empower them to obtain better results with their work.
Motivation is the driver that pushes people towards achieving their goals. Most employees are highly motivated when they start a new job, but somewhere along the way many of them begin losing sight of the positive aspects and start feeling trapped in a job that only puts bacon on the table.
Onboarding new employees is often a difficult and somewhat frustrating process for everybody involved. New hires are struggling to navigate a completely new and unknown environment, while supervisors are eager to turn them into productive members of the team.
In every aspect of life, long-term relationships are more rewarding for all parts involved than short-term alliances. Of course, the latter can make useful strategies at key moments and for achieving immediate goals. However, if you are running a marathon and not just trying to win a race, you definitely want reliable partners you can actually count on along the way. Therefore, if you are looking to building your company up in the future, you should see long-term collaboration as a priority.
For a second, I challenge you to leave aside everything you’ve learned or heard about productivity so far. Every advice that prompts you to wake up before sunrise and read your goals out loud every night. The purpose of this article is not to invalidate the oldest tricks in the book. However, we cannot ignore the fact that many recipes are either hard to follow, or simply won’t work for a lot of people. The good news is there are ways to boost productivity 🙂
Prioritizing your work life might not seem very easy, when everything you have to do feels important. Taking things as they come, without having a strategy, usually throws you into chaos, where you running a race against time day after day. Eventually, this continuous fight is likely to lead to burnout and dramatically affect your life.
Here are 7 “safety measures” that will hopefully help you fight the chaos and reclaim your productivity.
Write down the most important things in your life – those that you wouldn’t give up for anything, no matter what.
A simple way to do that is by designing a chart of the most important areas of your life:
Next, you should write down your top three priorities for each area.
Once you do that, make sure to invest 80% of your time and most of your efforts into accomplishing the items on your chart. The rest of the time should be allocated to completing other tasks that need to be done.
Simple and intuitive, your schedule should be focused around your non-negotiable core values.
The amount of time you assign to each of your tasks reflects your true priorities. Very often people dedicate more time to less important tasks, losing sight of what truly matters. Avoid taking on menial tasks and learn to delegate those assignments that don’t necessarily require your expertise.
One of the easiest strategies for efficient scheduling is the 1-3-5 method. This means that your daily schedule will feature one very important task; three tasks of medium importance; and five little things.
I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent. – Eisenhower
Eisenhower inspired productivity experts to create what is called The Eisenhower Matrix for prioritizing tasks. The matrix uses the urgency and importance values to make your work life easier, as shown below.
The Eisenhower Matrix
Both at work and in everyday y life, each generation has something unique to offer. However, the culture gap between generations can make things uncomfortable at times, leaving people feeling less welcome. So how do we create a work culture that brings people together instead of tearing them apart? This is the core of my article, so I encourage you to read forward and find out.
Team collaboration goes big when your team goes small. Team size in itself affects productivity and team synergy. Smaller teams have higher engagement, less overhead, better flow, and improved decision making. Best of all, it is more cost-effective to reach goals with smaller teams.
Yet, many times organizations go with “bigger is better. This often comes at the cost of effectiveness and produces sub-par results. So much so that it may be better to simply create two smaller teams than using a large one.
Productivity right after the holidays is tough and can surely be quite a stretch. The kind of stretch that, in brief, rips through your hard-earned rest. Indeed, it may be hard to get everything back in gear. The absence of work is easy to adapt to, in time.
Time management is a skill you can learn. If only you had the time. To be fair, it might seem a lot less crucial than it is. Yet, today’s world is full of time challenges. There never seems to be enough time for anything. People are always in a hurry, everybody is always busy.
Some would love to have more time to spend with family and friends. Others would really enjoy spending that extra time in the gym. Or doing yoga, meditating, learning an instrument. There are some for whom there is never enough time. In fact, the common denominator for all entrepreneurs is that they never have the time. And, with startups as well as with anything else in life, being on time is crucial.
