How To Improve Your Team Performance for Q2

Q2 is upon us, and now is a perfect time to implement new tools and strategies to ramp up your team’s performance for the coming quarter.

Start by looking back at how your team did last quarter and consider what went well and what could maybe be improved upon. 

The observations you come up with will help you decide which of the productivity-boosting strategies and tools below are right for you and your team.

Keep in mind that you can try following these tips to start increasing your team’s productivity at any time — it doesn’t matter what quarter it is; it’s always a good time to start working more efficiently!

Do These Things To Boost Your Team’s Performance for the Next Quarter

1. Use Spike for team communication and collaboration

If communication and collaboration are an area you feel you and your team could improve in this quarter, Spike is a powerful team chat app and all-in-one collaborative workspace that can help you out.

Spike’s flagship feature is conversational email, which takes your traditional email threads that are full of repetitive replies, headings, subheadings, and signatures and turns them into instant message-style chat conversations.

This powerful feature removes the clutter from your inbox and helps email conversations with your team flow more naturally and quickly, allowing you to better communicate and get more done in less time.

Spike is also full of other useful features, including group chats, collaborative notes, tasks, and to-do lists, and built-in voice messaging and video meetings.

In short, Spike is full of all the features that you might have historically needed and a handful of different apps and platforms to use. 

Because of this, Spike drastically cuts down the amount of time you and your team spend switching between different apps and screens, making your communication and collaboration much more efficient.

2. Practice holding mindful meetings

One of the banes to productivity in the workplace is having too many unnecessary meetings that could have been an email or a chat message.

Such unproductive meetings will drain one of your team’s most valuable resources and time and can also drain your teammates of their motivation.

To combat this, practice holding meetings that are mindful of everyone’s time. Only schedule meetings when it’s absolutely necessary, and try to keep them short and to the point.

Make sure every meeting has a specific purpose, and create meeting plans that outline all the topics to be discussed in those meetings.

Keep side discussions to a minimum during meetings, especially if they’re only relevant to a couple of people, and ask that team members follow up on specific topics or questions via chat or email after the meeting is over.

3. Use shared to-do lists

Creating shared to-do lists for different projects your team is working on is an excellent way to hold people accountable and ensure important tasks don’t fall through the cracks.

A shared to-do list allows everyone to see who is working on what and where different tasks are in terms of getting completed. Anyone who has any questions or comments can add them to the shared list, where anyone else is free to respond or read the info.

4. Promote a healthy work-life balance

Nothing hurts productivity like burnout, so make sure to promote a healthy work-life balance on your team. This means encouraging team members to use their time off, go on vacations, and log off on time each day.

Offering employee benefits that support health and wellness, such as gym memberships or subscriptions to online workout classes, can also go a long way toward improving your teammates’ work-life balance.

Ultimately, the better everyone feels physically and mentally, the more they’ll get done.

5. Delegate

If you’re managing a team, you should be focusing on the big picture and overall strategies to get things done. As such, it’s important to know how to delegate tasks to other people on your /team who can do them.

Any time a task pops up that you think you need to do yourself, stop for a minute and ask yourself: “could someone else on my team do this?” If the answer is yes, provide someone with enough guidance to complete the task successfully and hand it off.

6. Recognize good performance

Receiving recognition for a job well done encourages people to keep being productive, so make sure to provide recognition any time someone on your team goes above and beyond what’s required of them or does something exceptionally well. 

You don’t have to make a big show of it, which some people might not be comfortable with, but a thoughtful chat message or email thanking them for their hard work will almost certainly be appreciated.

For employees, knowing their hard work doesn’t go unnoticed helps improve morale and motivation, which both lead to higher productivity.

Conclusion

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to improving team productivity quarter after quarter, but by implementing some of the tools and strategies discussed above, you should see measurable changes in how much your team is getting done.