When your company’s organizational structure is smaller than average, it can be difficult to help your team manage their individual workloads. People may end up getting stretched too thin, or their time may be consumed by tasks that aren’t the best use of the efforts and skillsets. Here are some strategies to help a small core staff maximize their productivity.
Help Your Team Communicate and Collaborate
Use programs that will help your team keep one another updated about project and task management. By using an organized communication platform, everyone can stay on the same page about what the top priorities are in a given day or week, and they’ll be clear about who’s responsible for individual items. Streamlining communication will help to ensure a chain of accountability in project management, and it will help to ensure that nothing gets lost in the shuffle.
Outsource Customer Service Tasks
Providing customer service can tend to be an especially time consuming task. Your business’ success depends on good customer service but having to provide immediate responses to customer inquiries can derail your team from more important tasks. Get help with chat support to ensure that your customers can have instant access to help without tying up your most valuable personnel.
Set Regular Supervisory Meetings
Even when you have a lot of work on your plate, it’s still imperative that you set aside some time to touch base with the people who you supervise on a regular basis. It will help you stay updated on their progress with assignments, and it will create a forum in which they can ask questions and get some guidance when they need it. Having a set time for supervisory meetings in which your team can ask you questions will make them feel more comfortable about asking them. Moreover, it can help to prevent sporadic interruptions in your workday that can steer you off track of what you need to focus on when they need help with something.
Prevent Burnout
When your people need to get a lot done to meet a deadline, they can rise to the challenge as needed. However, it’s not reasonable to demand that people go above and beyond what should be expected of them all of the time. Don’t let somebody’s ability to put in extra hours when you’re in crisis mode become the standard of how they need to perform all of the time. When expectations are set too high and regular workloads become continuously too large, your best staff can experience burnout. Their performance will decline, and their attitude may turn sour. Despite having a strong work ethic, even the hardest working employees will get demoralized when they have more work than they can possibly do. The best ways to prevent burnout are delegating work evenly, setting reasonable expectations, and giving people the opportunity to take some off or modify their schedule when they need to.
Solicit Feedback
If you have to distribute a large workload among just a few staff members, they may offer valuable input about the best ways to do it. Ask people to set assignments and goals for themselves. Encourage open dialogs about what people are struggling with or how they think certain operational procedures could be improved. When you ask your team for their feedback, they’ll appreciate that their input is being considered and valued.
Allocating your employees’ time effectively is integral to good management, and it could be a determinative factor in your company’s overall performance. Outsourcing what you can, fostering good communication, and fostering a positive and team-driven environment will help your staff to work as efficiently as possible.