Establishing an Effective Internal Culture to Support Team Members Performance at Work, Reach Long-Term Strategic Goals, and Achieve Financial Milestones
Company culture is more than just about diversity in the work place, exciting social media, or hosting regular employee meetings. In order to get things done on the short and long-term timelines, a productive, performance-based culture could be the improvement your office needs. You can assign as many tasks as you want, but if the tasks at hand aren’t centered around collective performance improvement, it’s unlikely to change.
The idea is to create a company culture through a management system that incorporates constructive feedback, optimized performance, and a disciplined but skills-driven approach to project management. Put an end to constantly assigning tasks, and just establish a culture.
With upper management support and a little bit of freedom, staff members in the workplace can come up with their own ways to improve work performance including prioritizing important tasks, check-ins throughout the day, setting milestones, avoiding distractions, and finding an ideal work-life balance.
Ways to Improve Communication in Company Culture
In order to develop effective communication at your corporation across staff members, start by implementing regular communication avenues and schedules. Too many communication tasks throughout the day interrupt team members and cause a break in work focus.
If your staff is busy taking phone calls, or completing minuscule tasks, instead of directing focus to projects, it will be much harder to start working or actually get any work done.
Keeping in touch throughout the day tends to be a way to waste time and creates unnecessary distractions on the job. Help your team members to improve performance by initiating a more productive communication schedule.
Encourage your team to:
- Stop multitasking
- Develop a time management strategy
- Focus on one task at a time
- Keep track of ideas by taking notes
It also takes a lot of energy and a significant amount of time to create emails or talk on the phone. Instead of communicating about work tasks or projects continuously, employees can improve performance by focusing on the task at hand and spend time and energy on getting the job done, not just talking about it.
Improving Work Performance as a Way to Increase Profitability
An incompetent or inattentive team is not going to complete required tasks, drive profits or improve finances for your corporation. Especially in a time of market volatilty, it’s important to have a strategic plan.
There are a few tips to improve performance at work that will drive up ROI and profits for your firm:
- Assess your employee’s unique strengths and weaknesses. Assign diplomatic, friendly, well-spoken employees to customer relation roles. Have employees that are good with delegating act as a manager. Direct staff members who are great with numbers to accounting positions.
- Constructive feedback goes a long way. If you never offer tips or ways to improve to your employees, how will they know how to be more productive or efficient on the job? Define a workplace culture that is productive and supportive and constantly offers performance-based feedback to your team.
- Have a one task at a time mentality. If you overburden your employees with work, and task after task, and don’t define which are the most important tasks, and which to focus on, it will be hard for them to achieve the productive, performance-based goals you have in mind. Help your staff by letting them complete one task, and then move on to the next. A good manager won’t push multiple projects at once, but rather suggest that they could complete each work item before starting the next.
- Productivity is not a straight line. A big tip for growing profitability at your corporation is related to acknowledging that many things happen throughout the day, not just work. Between phone calls, desk time, personal life, office hours, employee communication, etc., the energy required to create effective work performance must be flexible. One of the biggest ways to improve work performance is not by pushing employees to focus, chaining them to the desk, or reprimanding them about phone calls as a waste of time. Allow for flow. Allow for breaks.
- Focus on yourself. We may all have a manager but except for directives from the chain of command, there is no need to focus on someone else or on everyone else at work. A project or task is complete only when we focus on our own tasks first, not when we try to point fingers or criticize others in meetings.
- A workplace is a collaborative environment. Ideas about how to improve work performance can come from anywhere. Encourage staff to share their ideas about ways to improve work flow, general productivity, or how to not waste time in team meetings.
The bottom line is in order to grow your corporations’ bottom line, and improve work performance, you’ll need to develop a functional, productive office culture. You might also benefit from working with a dedicated, specialty consluting firm like Hunter Stevens LLC. We can help you restructure for a more effective business approach.
Assessing your Talent
Improving your work performance, office-wide, requires attention to detail. Each staff member should be assigned unique tasks that fall within their skill set. You may also be able to develop work performance improvement by offering work training, and if you can: create a culture with a focus on the goal of milestones, not micro-management.
- Spend time getting to know each manager. Keep track of their schedule, of tasks they complete, of employee feedback, and work together with them to support productivity.
- Each employee is different. The skills and tools they bring to the table are different. Some employees are more prone to distractions but can deliver incredible business acumen, or bring high energy to the table. Other employees could take many breaks or personal phone calls, yet work diligently when in the workplace, and have high productivity. Don’t enforce a one-size-fits-all set of rules on your employees, since each one is unique.
- Take time to determine which role and tasks each staff member should take on. Assign different individuals different work tasks for a period of time. Measure their productivity on each task and their performance. Task them with deciding which are the most important tasks, and observe if they tackle those tasks first.
You can improve your performance as an entire organization by putting people in the right roles, and encouraging workplace feedback. When staff members achieve milestones, you could also celebrate them and show them that your corporation is on track with quarterly goals.
Identify Areas for Cost Reduction and Eliminate Redundancy
If your business staff is doing the same work over and over, it might be time to host some meetings and develop tools to work more cost-effectively. You can improve your work performance by asking business staff to work with focus.
Project management is a great way to develop timeliness for task completion and to ensure your workplace is on schedule and productive.
Distractions take away from job focus and work, and are counterproductive. A project can’t get completed on time or in line with project goals if the manager doesn’t spend time organizing the job, or assign anyone to start working.
Give your work team a few tools to eliminate wasteful workplace behavior:
- Ask them not to spend too much time taking breaks.
- Limit personal phone calls or time away from the desk.
- Clearly outline the job duties, the schedule of events, and what productivity looks like as it is related to each task.
You can also reduce costs at work by hiring an in-house social media manager. Since they have a personal relationship with a day in the life at your corporation, they have the skills to do the work with greater performance than outsourcing. Plus, they’ll help you successfully grow your business and generate revenue.
If you still need to restructure or cut costs, Hunter Stevens experienced corporate consulting can offer strategic evalutation to update your workflow and support performance improvement.
Task-oriented teamwork: If performance is the goal, you can improve work performance by asking the staff to get important tasks done first. If they complete these tasks first, you’ll see a huge improvement in performance at work.
Offer productivity tips: Don’t just ask your staff to be productive, tell them how you are measuring productivity. Give them tips on how to avoid distractions, on work norms, on how to improve their skills, what to spend time on, and other related information.
If you spend just a little bit of time to work on reducing cost and eliminating redundant tasks, you’ll improve your work performance for the entire corporation.
Establish and Implement KPIs, Metrics, and Goals
Your staff should have a very clear idea of what good performance at work looks like and how to improve work performance based on the goals your corporation has structured.
Decide what the key performance indicators are for successful performance at work for each employee.
Here are a few metrics that businesses use to measure success and work performance:
- Number of tasks completed
- Completion of important tasks before non-time-sensitive tasks
- Attending meetings
- Staying on schedule
- Limiting the number of personal breaks away from the desk
Improving performance at work is much easier if there are clearly defined goals for employees to follow.
Align Your Management Team on Corporate Goals
A business and its’ employees can only be as productive as the management team allows. If your upper management is not on schedule, imposes too many meetings, overwhelms your team with one project after the other, or is out of line with company culture, work performance will suffer.
Ask your management group to break away from outdated approaches to work performance.
- Have them assign the work tasks that benefit productivity.
- Ask them to keep work life balance in mind.
- Establish that everyone needs a break from work
- Keep meetings to a minimum
- Stay up to date on schedules
- Let them invite staff to improve work performance with tips
- Assign one project at a time
- Break out of old work patterns and break out of distractions
- Meetings should be work related
- Tasks should be assigned to the right staff.
If you really want to improve company culture and help your staff improve work performance, get management on board. Since they are the ones assigning tasks or work, they’ll need to work with you.
Improve Your Work Performance Corporation-Wide
It is possible to improve your work performance company-wide. It’s not about one project or one time line, it’s about assigning tasks the right way, offering your staff members tips, and focusing on the big picture.
It’s also important to remember that if your company is focused on work tasks, assigning task after task, project after project, has a ‘work, work, work,’ mentality, and never allows anyone to take breaks, the line to measure performance 1-10 will go down, not up.
Use the above tips to help your corporation improve work flow, improve culture, improve the bottom line, and most importantly improve performance.
If you need help to get your staff on task to develop a plan of action, Hunter Stevens Specialty consulting firm is here to help. Task by task, we will work with your office to create a culture of productivity.