A well-functioning team is crucial for any business. Everyone must be at peak productivity each day to optimize operational efficiency and make progress on company goals.
It only takes one person’s decreased productivity to negatively impact the workflow of the entire team. Whether it’s one person or your whole team struggling to produce high-quality work, it’s essential to address it and figure out how to enhance productivity – and project management is a good place to start. Effective project management can have a profound impact on how effective your workforce is.
The Impact Well-Executed Project Management Has on Employee Productivity
Employees are much more productive when managers define a clear direction for each project, enable interdepartmental communication and collaboration, and delegate tasks well. Fortunately, well-executed project management helps all of the above happen seamlessly.
It Enables Interdepartmental Communication and Collaboration
Each department needs to function well individually. But it’s also essential for each department to work with one another often to get tasks done. In other words, communication and collaboration across departments are necessary to execute various projects in your business.
For example, your marketing department may need to work with product development to understand what makes a product unique so they can market it effectively. Or, your sales team may need to work with marketing to see how their respective funnels overlap and create a collective one.
Businesses with well-executed project management ensure employees use the same communication tools and have equal access to project resources. This helps their teams communicate and work together more efficiently across departments, fueling team productivity.
Delegation is Easier
Although you may want to, taking on everything in your business isn’t productive. You’ll run yourself ragged and burn out. If anything does get done, it won’t be high quality. You’ll also make your team feel like they aren’t needed, and their motivation will decrease because of it.
A significant part of project management is defining tasks and assigning them to individuals on your team based on their strengths and workload. You can delegate tasks efficiently while ensuring your team feels valued and their skillsets are used in meaningful ways.
There’s a Clear Direction for Everyone To Follow
One of the biggest reasons workplace productivity decreases is because employees don’t understand their roles and duties. They don’t know what they’re supposed to do, let alone why. So, they end up doing the bare minimum, if anything at all.
Effective project management is all about giving employees clear direction for everything they do. You establish goals for every project, assign specific tasks to each team member, and define timelines. You can also use project management tools that provide employees with the resources and communication channels they need to be most productive.
Tips for Improving Project Management
With all that well-executed project management can do for a team, your next move should be doing something to enhance the project management strategies in your business. Start with these three tips to improve project management in your business and boost employee productivity.
Learn About Your Team
As mentioned above, effective project management relies on delegation. Each employee should be assigned tasks based on their strengths to ensure each one is completed well. But to do this, you must first know your team.
Learn everything that you can about each person on your team. For example, what is meaningful work to them? What are they good at and what can they work on? What are their career goals? What are their interests generally? What’s their personality like?
You can learn these things in formal meetings and conversations in passing. You can also observe how your employees work on each project to understand more about where their skills are most valuable.
It will take time to truly get to know each team member. However, it’s worth the effort to form these personal relationships so that you can understand how to best use employees for every project.
Use a Quality Project Management Solution
A quality project management solution is critical in your efforts to improve project management. It’s what facilitates communication and collaboration among employees when they can’t be in the same room. It also keeps project details and resources organized.
A good project management solution can simplify project management tasks through specific features. If it takes team members a long time to get necessary information from their co-workers, this stalls the workflow and interrupts productivity. Being able to automatically route information requests to specific people based on the data needed speeds up this process and decreases workflow interruptions.
A quality project management solution allows for real-time schedule updates that keep everyone on the same page regarding deadlines. You should also be able to submit and access resources in a central location to ensure employees have what they need when they need it for all projects.
Establish Clear Goals and Roles for Every Project
One of the most critical parts of successful project management is attaching clear goals to every project. In addition to this, each employee needs to know their part. Your team needs to know what they’re striving for and what their role is in getting there to feel empowered and motivated to be highly productive.
Outline the results you want to achieve for the project in front of you. Then, after creating a step-by-step plan for executing the said project, assign tasks to each employee. Make sure they understand what to do and who to go to should they have questions.
Effective project management can ignite team productivity. It facilitates interdepartmental communication and collaboration, enables efficient delegation, and keeps your team on the same page with a clear direction for every project. If you’ve yet to dig into improving project management, this is your sign to start today.