Every leader desires to have functional teams that would work towards the actualization of the organizational goals. Workplace productivity is the topmost priority for any leader or manager. You can achieve productivity at the workplace if there is a high level of efficiency in utilizing organizational resources in actualizing organizational goals.

It is your responsibility as a leader to ensure that the system and activities operational in the organization are such that they will encourage productivity. You can achieve this by ensuring that your team members have access to whatever support they will need to be more effective in carrying out their duties.

Why Is Productivity Essential in Organizations?

When there is an increase in productivity, there is also an overall increase in revenue. An increase in productivity means that the organization and the leader will do more even with the same or fewer resources. Where every other condition remains stable, an increase in productivity will ultimately lead to expansion in business and continued growth.

It is not only the organization or the leader that benefits from a more productive environment. Productivity has been pinpointed as one of the factors that determines work satisfaction. An effective environment presents individuals with the opportunity to maximize their potential in a conducive work environment.

As a manager or leader, you would want to create a work environment that encourages maximum productivity in your team. However, you can be engaging in certain activities that may be counterproductive to your goal. So, what are some of the activities that slow down your team and deter productivity on a broad scale?

#1. Focusing on Utilization versus Flow

High resource utilization is always seen as a recipe for effectiveness in organizational management. Therefore, many leaders and managers try to keep their teams busy at all times so that they can function at an optimum level. When most leaders and managers look into capacity planning, significant attention and leadership energy is expended to maximize resource utilization. However, this approach could be one of the factors that are slowing your team down.

Think about an oil pipeline. It would be tremendously wasteful to build a massive pipeline and push a small quantity of oil through it. Engineers will calculate the optimal pressure and volume of oil that can be moved, and the oil will fill the pipe in a constant stream. That’s what we refer to as 100% resource utilization.

More comparable to our efforts in teams of people, let’s now look at what happens when we try to get 100% utilization, that in traffic terms, all lanes used with as close to constant as possible flow of vehicles. Human variability factors include driver distraction when not moving, cars that break down blocking others, or drivers changing lanes. The result is a traffic jam, but 100% of the pipeline, or the highway, in this case, is utilized.

Suppose your approach is to increase the number of tasks accomplished by each team to raise a productivity metric. In that case, having corners cut and unfinished projects will also increase, resulting in a decrease in the value delivered to customers and clients. However, when you focus on flow optimization, you increase the possibility of collaboration among your team, which leads to an overall improvement in delivery.

#2. Teams are always blocked

Does missed deadlines, unhealthy politics, long hours of meetings, and possible chaos sound familiar to you? These are the effects of cross-team dependencies. Dependencies can slow down your teams considerably and has a ripple effect on the ability of the teams to deliver projects right on time.

Cross-team dependencies make teams depend on one another to deliver projects. In many organizations where this dependency exists, different functions necessary to actualize a project are broken down and allocated to different teams. If a single team fails to deliver, it will ripple through all the depending teams, again decreasing the flow of value to your customers and clients.

#3.Too much WIP

Do you sometimes, as a leader, feel your teams didn’t accomplish much even after having a busy week where all the team members were busy with one project or the other? This is a widespread occurrence, especially where so many projects are in progress.

Work in progress (WIP) is any activity that you have started but haven’t completed. Excessive WIP is terrible for three important reasons.

First, it exhausts teams mentally. Anything we have started but not finished occupies some part of our available mental capacity. The more WIP, the more my mental energy is consumed with keeping track of it all. Add to that the time and energy lost in context switching, and the added burden of WIP can become overwhelming.

Second, excessive WIP leads us to mistake activity for accomplishment. When we have a near-infinite stream of things to work on and the task at hand bogs down, needs help from elsewhere expectational increasing blockages and dependencies.

Third, excess WIP hides process problems and other wastes lurking in our system.

#4. Everything is a Priority

One of the limited resources available to you as a leader is time. The teams may have several projects to work on but, in reality, may not have the time to attend to all at the same time. Whenever all the items on your to-do list feel important, it is an indication that prioritization is needed.

Without prioritizing, leaders and their teams may not be able to develop a formal method of evaluating the importance of different tasks and projects. This evaluation is not correctly carried out, and it becomes almost impossible to decide which job should be given attention to per time. Inability to arrive at this juncture will slow your teams down.

#5. Highly specialized teams

While specialized teams have their perks, they can slow down the overall productivity and flow. Specialized teams create bottlenecks in the broad ecosystem and create a high degree of vulnerability. With a high degree of specialization, teams may concentrate on their assigned functions and pay little attention to learning new things.

A team may even stop learning how to collaborate with other teams in the organization. This makes the team stagnant and very vulnerable to change. Individuals in a team who concentrate only on the functions they are assigned and make no effort to learn can also frustrate the efforts of other team members.

Conclusion

Understanding the different activities that may slow down your team is very crucial as a leader. Identifying these activities and finding solutions to them will help you to better position yourself and your team for maximum productivity.