How to Make a Productivity Plan for your Individual or Entire Team

Poor productivity isn't an uncommon scenario for companies. Almost every organization has to deal with an unproductive environment at one point.

But lately, with the work from home impositions, many companies have to deal with severe cases of poor productivity—especially those organizations with no proper remote strategies and tools.

However, it's always better to start later rather than not making any efforts at all. So, if you don't yet have an action plan for improving your team or individual members' effectiveness, you can start today.

For that, you simply have to make the team and individual productive plan based on the real-time performance metrics, and you can maximize your organization's productivity seamlessly. So, let's scroll down to know how to make your team more effective using a productivity planner.

What's a Productivity Planner?

A productivity planner or performance improvement plan is a document created by managers, employers, and other authorized persons to boost a team's and individual members' productivity. This document is drafted after analyzing different performance metrics in real-time so that individual team members' skills can be improved.

According to the Anatomy of Work, global employees spend the majority of their time (60%) on work-related work and only 27% of their time on skilled work. Here if you create a systematic plan for your individual team to achieve the company's goals, problems, and objectives, you can better utilize the skills of your staff.

Importantly, you can customize activities to improve your team's productivity without much hassle. A productivity plan is drafted after measuring individual and whole team's performance in real-time; thus, it can improve your organization's efficiency pretty quickly.

Though, you first need to get a time tracking tool like TrackOlap that can measure various productivity metrics of every team member in real-time. Once you get this tool, the next step is to understand how to make your team more effective using accurate tracking data.

How to Create an Effective Productivity Planner

A productivity planner might sound like a lot of work right now, but when it's done in the right manner using automated tools, it's not that hard. If you are observing your projects aren't meeting their deadlines, lack communication and coordination among your remote workers, it is very important for you to streamline an effective productivity planner.

To formulate a productivity planner to improve your team effectiveness, you simply have to follow these steps:

Step 1. Swipe under your bed first

This heading must have confused you. So, let's help you understand the point properly. Before creating the individual productivity planner, you should first understand what type of conditions your employees are working in.

Sometimes your internal affairs are the main culprit behind your employees' low productivity. For example, if you don't have a proper portal for your employees to work from home, you can't blame them for poor performance. Without an adequate communication and assignment management system, your remote workers can coordinate or deliver work on time.

Similarly, it's common for your team to feel unmotivated or discouraged during the present pandemic conditions. So, you have to consider all the internal and external factors under which your employees are working today. Mostly, you have to provide your remote team with adequate solutions before you create a productivity planner for them.

Step 2. Align all the elements of a productivity planner

Once you have provided your team with the effective work from home setup, the next step is to align all the essential elements of creating a productivity planner. Based on your organization culture and work policies, your productivity planner elements can vary, but the common ones are:

Team vision: Under this section, you have to outline the vision, mission, and objects for your team revolving around your company's policies.
Goals and objectives: Goals are the outcomes of the work that you want an employee to chase. On the contrary, objectives define the proper course of action you intend your employees to follow to meet your company goals.
Key performance indicators: A KPI is a measurement metric that lets you understand how successfully the objectives are achieved. To set KPIs, you need constant productivity data so you can analyze and modify the team's objectives according to the situational changes.
Timeframes: To set a productivity plan, you need to also set a timeframe. A plan can have a month, six, or even a year as a timeframe. But it is better to set shorter time frames so you can measure performance efficiency frequently. Also, involve your team members while deciding a timeframe for the entire or a part of a plan.
Expectations: Apart from the company's objectives, the manager's expectations and observations should be clearly defined in the pipeline. Managers can note down performance data of every team member based on the time tracking report and set their expectations, and observe whether there's any room for progress or not.

Step 3. Onboard HR team in your team

While drafting a productivity planner for your team, keep your HR team in the loop. That's because the HR team is more familiar with your employees and how they will react to certain situations. Thus, they can provide more insight into whether your productivity planner is correct or there's still room for improvement.

However, you don't need to consult the HR team at every point. Once the department has given you a green signal on your planner, you should simply go for it.

Finally, you just need to properly format your planner and share it with your team and wait for the results.

How to Make a Team More Effective — Monitoring

So, business owners and managers, your work isn't done after creating and implementing the productivity planner. In fact, your real work starts afterward. Now, you have to constantly monitor your team and ensure whether they are meeting your objectives.

This monitoring part is a bit tricky, especially in work from home paradigms. So, you need to use time tracking software here to make sure your productivity planner is offering the desired results. Further, you should consider these factors to properly manage and monitor performance:

Transparency

Productivity impromptus plans are dreadful for employees. They consider that these plans are the last chance for them to prove their skills, and if they fail, you will fire them. This, in return, puts employees under a lot of stress, which can affect their performance metrics.

So, it's on managers to send a clear message to their employees. Managers should assure employees that planners aren't created to fire them. Instead, it is drafted to help you maximize your performance and improve your skills. This can only be achieved with an open and smooth communication system.

Share timely feedback

Timely feedback and updates are a crucial part of productivity plan monitoring. Ensure to share feedback in a definite manner with your team, like weekly or monthly. With the fixed feedback schedule, you can better compare improvements based on your previous feedback.

Additionally, you can gain intellectual insights into your team's workflow and tempo. On top of it, when your team sees you making frequent follow-ups, it sends a positive message among individual team players and even encourages them to be more effective.

Provide an opportunity to improve

Just pinpoint improvement areas, or plain feedback won't help your employees to be a better version of themselves. For this task, you have to provide relevant study material, training, and other peer programs to your employees.

Moreover, if managers can have one-on-one sessions with individual team members, it will offer even higher results. For example, if you found certain employees wasting time on Google search to find the relevant information, you can host an online class to train your peers for effective Googling.

Communicate clearly

Let's just clear one thing, without proper communication; you can't make your team effective. No matter how dynamic a productivity planner you have drafted without clear communication, it's nothing.

Here communication is essential in each stage — before, during, and after implementation of the productivity planner. So, strengthen your organization's communication system before even thinking about productivity planning.

Ending Note

A productivity planner is just a document based on previous data and predictions. So, it can give you a rough outline to execute your goals and objectives. But don't forget, we are dealing with employees, aka humans here. And, their performance and feeling change often.

Therefore, it is important for you to monitor and track your employees' performance in real-time so you can draw a perfect planner. And in this, a TrackOlap suit can help you in every step — from pre-planning to post-analysis.

So, for better understanding, book your free demo with us today!