Strategies For Supporting Your Team And Increasing Performance

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Regardless if a remote team is brand new or if it’s a concept you’ve been pioneering since pre-pandemic times, boosting team productivity is always a challenge. With employees quitting their jobs voluntarily at a rate of 25 percent, you need to pivot your priorities and place employees at the forefront.

Software as a service (SaaS) companies appear in every domain. These startups are dedicated to creating software to facilitate your operations, from accounting to employee engagement.

Relying heavily on SaaS, we’ll outline the best strategies to keep your team happy, productive, and dedicated to your business.

10 Strategies for Supporting Your Team and Increasing Work Performance

Put your employees first. Making a profit is not about selling a product, it’s about nurturing the team behind the scenes. You will soon discover how spending time on your teams will boost their productivity.

Develop strategies within your operations to support this move. The best part is, the majority of these processes are fully automated.

Here are 10 strategies to make your company a great place to work:

Performance management

Before you start down any road, ensure the foundations are laid to efficiently track improvements; build your empire with a solid process from the get-go. Subscribe to a performance management system to get started.

It is a holistic approach to managing your company, teams, and employees. Your employee is entered into the system from the hiring stages and updated throughout the work cycle. You can add them to their team so you can track the full team development.

With a more advanced provider, you can

organize your employee evaluations
121s
growth opportunities and training
send surveys to boost engagement

Team building events and retreats

You might consider this a costly option. Larger companies with 100+ employees choose organizing evening events with food, drinks, and entertainment.

Rent out a local hall or erect a marquee on the company’s property. Hire a band, DJs, and caterers. This type of event can either be a sit-down formal meal or a free-standing Coachella-like evening.

Smaller remote teams spread throughout one continent benefit from retreats. Find the best travel and expense management software to easily organize your trip. You don’t need the added stress of organizing the event to interrupt the excitement.

As the company owner, you pay for flights, accommodation, and food throughout the whole trip.

Organize events during the stay, like local tastings, dance performances, hikes, and escape rooms. Book restaurants and karaoke for the evening.

But it’s not all fun and games during a company retreat. This is a prime opportunity for your employees to meet to work together and brainstorm ideas. Team members hidden behind screens come out with amazing ideas.

Providing a bonus like this is an easy motivator, to say the least. Not many people have the luxury to travel. Providing an obligatory, all-expenses-paid trip proves your care about your team, which will increase their work performance.

Health and wellness

To be recognized as a great place to work, your employees and teams need benefits and perks. This simple gesture might look like a huge expenditure but consider it an investment.

Do your research to discover the easiest-to-use HR companies. Find the websites dedicated to providing your teams with an experience unrivaled by any other company in your sector.

Different ways you can reward your teams:

A wellness stipend
Annual company retreats
Local meetups
Virtual work lunches
Co-working space fund
Highest performing team competitions

In a physical office, health and wellness come in the shape of unlimited free fruit in the cantine and scheduled free massages. In a remote setting, this is more difficult to achieve.

Now that you have employees spanning many different states, countries, and continents, make their comfort your priority.

Accessibility

Accessing company documents can be difficult in a remote setting. A team member finds themselves wasting precious hours looking for documents, pinging people who don’t respond and requesting access and passcodes.

Facilitate your team’s workload by being transparent. Google Office is a great example. Everyone with the same domain email has access to all documents. You have to click a button, as usual, but make it obligatory for each new document created.

Accessibility wears many hats. It allows a company to work on flexible hours and a-synchronically. Providing your employees with schedules they can choose is known to improve work performance.

Time tracking

Tracking the hours your teams work helps reduce the pressure. Often they are overworked. Teams have too many tasks and not enough people to perform them.

Once you begin to track hours, using software like Time Analytics & TimeDoctor, you can easily pull the data to understand:

What tasks are taking the longest to complete
How many people does it take to perform a certain task
Which teams would benefit from extra time and resources
Which tasks are time-consuming that produce the least effect on the company as a whole

If you can outsource some tasks, or get more employees, your team will be less stressed. They will feel ignited and boosted to work harder having more time freed up from menial tasks.

Mentorship program

Introduce a professional growth program to show your employees how you care about their professional development. Appoint a more senior employee as a mentor, someone your employee can look up to. Encouraged employees improve the team atmosphere.

Mentoring is a prized initiative that has become forgotten with the insurgency in remote work. It seems to be logistically impossible. How can someone shadow someone else in a remote setting?

E-mentoring is a thing and it’s here to stay. Virtual mentoring relies on:

Messaging on instant chat platforms
Emails
Video explanations (Loom)
Coffee chats and working lunches on Zoom
Social media networks and communities

Two people don’t need to be physically together to benefit from a mentorship program. What is important is the lesson, the teaching the senior employee can pass down to the junior.

The senior employee will take the junior under their wing and advise them on all things business. They prepare the eager junior and refer them for promotions.

Training and upskilling

Small teams and companies lack the human resources for 1 on 1 mentoring. However, there are online courses to train and upskill your staff. These courses can be a requirement or left for the employees to choose.

Required courses are often necessary for employees working in IT. They need to constantly upskill to stay on top, to keep your company on top. Rather than your employee looking for upskilling outside of the company, offer them the training, fully paid.

Other employees can choose to upskill or train a new skill. You provide the paid courses, and they pursue that in their own time. For a course not directly connected to their current role.

70% of employees worldwide are expecting a training model where they choose themselves what to study. Again, an investment to support your team. A highly skilled and trained workforce is very productive.

Project management

There are many platforms available for the whole company to work from online. Even hybrid and fully at-office teams benefit from a project management tool.

Involve your teams in the management and achievement of your company’s tasks. Rather than just set them something to do, let them see the bigger picture; give them access.

Project management tools enhance a team’s working experience. Different features include:

Toggle views for individual employees
Assign multiple tasks
Assign multiple people to one task
Visuals
Shared spaces and private spaces
Email notifications
Desktop versions
Mobile apps

For example, create a page with your company goals and mission statements and share it with everyone in the company. Create a group just for your marketing department, and another for finance.

These productivity tools are instant, save you time as a project manager/operations lead, and supply only the necessary information to each of your teams.

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Video SOPs

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are the bane of any team’s existence. They’re long and detailed documents that bring you step-by-step through the whole process.

As a new employee, you’re supposed to work with an SOP until you know it by heart. Then, as a more experienced employee, you’re to add to it. Team processes are constantly evolving, as are the SOPs.

One way to improve this experience is to record the SOPs. Embed the video in the document for new employees to quickly get a grasp of the procedure. After all, they’re not in the office physically watching the team perform the tasks.

Many people learn by watching, others by doing, and fewer still by reading a long, technical document. Divide the videos into segments so they’re easier to update when necessary.

Regular team evaluations

Make evaluations positive events. Use this time to inspire your team. Share with them:

Company goals and wins
Team goals and wins
Individual achievements

Starting on a positive note, your team will be eager to tackle the issues the improve their work performance. Instill in them a sense of empowerment.

It is common for remote teams to introduce games, an element of fun, into their evaluations. Try a pop quiz or trivia game. Show your human sides, your private selves, to connect with each other from across the screen.

Being accountable is an excellent quality any company can boast. But it’s difficult to nurture when you’re not physically present with your team. Creating a time for fun during team evaluations helps narrow that gap.

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Your teams are an investment, not an expenditure

Supporting your team and increasing work performance cultivate interchangeably. The moment you take the steps to back your teams you’ll see a boost in productivity.

There are plenty of ways to bring an office atmosphere into a remote workplace. If the costs are putting you off, remember to think of the expenditure as an investment. If you are still unwilling to budge, consider the money saved from renting a physical office space and the overhead costs implied.

Your teams are what make your company successful. You need to remember that, and above all, you need to show your employees you recognize that.