4 Ways to Make Your Team More Focused at Work

team focus

marketing planA focused team at work will ensure your hard-working employees are maximizing their productivity for your growing small business

The principle known as Price’s law claims that a small portion of the workforce in any enterprise does the majority of the work. According to Price, a square root that consists of the most productive staff members does half the work, whereas the rest do the other half.

Anyone who has ever worked on a group project knows exactly what this looks like in practice, yet, as an entrepreneur, you might have a problem figuring out the way around this. Firing your least productive employees simply doesn’t work, seeing as how you have no guarantee that the new hires will be any more hard-working than their predecessors.

So, what are you to do in this scenario? Well, there are several techniques that could help your team be more focused, in general. What this means is that everyone in your employ gets a productivity boost. That, of course, doesn’t mean that your least productive team members will become as productive as your top-achievers or that the productivity of your office will double or triple.

What happens is that everyone gets a slight boost in productivity, and yet, this more than adds up. With that in mind and without further ado, here are five ways to make your team more focused at work.



1. Working in intervals

The first thing you need to keep in mind is the fact that continuous work tends to be a lot more exhausting than work in intervals. Sure, when doing creative work, in a moment of inspiration you might feel the need to skip a break, yet, more often than not, this is not such a good idea. This is where the Pomodoro technique and similar methods come in handy. On paper, you shorten the amount of time that you work that day (after all, you have two 5 minute breaks every hour) but, then again, the spike in productivity that comes from this is impossible to ignore.

2. Employee monitoring software

Sometimes people need a little push in the right direction in order to give it their best, however, a direct approach isn’t always the best way to get them to do your bidding. After all, confronting people about the fact that they’re spending time on their private social media profiles instead of working, even when true, often makes the other party defensive.

Moreover, just because you’ve caught a person doing so once doesn’t mean that they’re spending a lot of time this way. This creates a fictional scenario where you are confronting a single employee that you’ve caught in front of half a dozen colleagues who regularly perform corporate time theft. Needless to say, all of this can be avoided with the help of employee monitoring software.

3. Device restrictions

Instead of being on a lookout for time-theft, why not prevent it or, at least, make it much more difficult for your employees to do so, to begin with? Namely, you might be tempted to equip your team with high-end hardware (iPhones, for instance) in order to boost productivity. Nevertheless, if their business phone is so much more powerful than their private phone, what’s to stop them from using it for their private purposes? Well, in the above-described fictional scenario, the simplest way to avoid this would be to make some iPhone restrictions to work-apps only, using the parental control option. In this way, you get optimal productivity with minimum effort and distractions.

work productivity

4. Insulation from distraction

Most important of all, sometimes all that you have to do for your team is ensure that they’re not exposed to more distractions than they can humanely handle. The way in which this works is fairly simple. First of all, you need to reduce the presence of visual distractions by clearing the field of vision of your staff and allowing them to focus on the screen or a folder in front of them.

Other than this, you also need to reduce the number of sound distractions, which is a much more complex task. Fortunately, you have a plethora of potentially efficient methods on your side. Individual offices need to be sound-proofed while people in the common area need to receive noise-canceling earbuds and silent keyboards. Aside from this, you can also move your break room further from the work zone.

As for tactile distractions, all you have to do is ensure that there’s enough room to walk between the desks.

Conclusion

As you can see, the solutions come from all sides – from introductions of new tech trends to the reorganization of your office space. Each of these methods gives some results but there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t implement everything. After all, they boost your productivity without creating a single side-effect.



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Dan Radak

VPS Security Specialist
Dan Radak is a web hosting security professional with ten years of experience. He is currently working with a number of companies in the field of online security, closely collaborating with a couple of e-commerce companies. He is also a coauthor on several technology websites and regular contributor to Technivorz.