Productivity is definitely the most important quality in a fully functioning office place. The way to boost productivity is to promote a synergistic workplace environment. “Synergy” is a word stemming from ancient Greece and is been implemented in society and philosophy since then.
Today, it refers to how office spaces can promote cooperation between employees and their managers to maximize production results. It can be difficult to rally the group together to inspire a better sense of interconnectedness and workflow. Here are a few things you need to consider to promote synergy in your workplace:
1. Hold yourself and others in your team more accountable
Accountability is an essential quality in any team. It is obviously essential that each member knows what their role is, what their duties are, and to be fully present at all workplace functions. It goes beyond basic responsibilities and tasks. If a mistake is made, it is important that the person who made the error to own up to it so that it can be quickly corrected. It can also highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each individual member so that they can take on a role that is more catered to them rather than continuing to make errors at a job that might not be good for them.
2. Know what skills everyone in the team possesses
Like the previous point mentioned, it is important to identify the skills of individual workers so that they can be placed in a role that is catered to them. To identify what skills a worker has, the manager can experiment different tasks with them and see how they handle the workload, the responsibilities and whether or not they can do the job better than everyone else.
It is important to understand that just because an employee is not particularly skilled at a certain job, it does not mean that they are a bad employee. It could be a matter of a mismatched job and employee pairing. If they don’t have the necessary skills, send them for basic business analysis courses for further training.
3. Understanding everyone’s roles and limits
Everyone has their limits and it is important to identify what those limits are. Some employees can take on a seemingly endless supply of workflow while others take their time on a smaller workload, but put a lot of detail into it. Pushing a person past their limits can only stress out the worker and force the team to extend deadlines if they are not able to keep up with it. Assign work according to the worker’s limits and make sure everyone takes on a fair share.
4. Encourage team members to share ideas and work updates
All it takes is a quick 15-minute get-together with the team to have a conversation about project updates and to share ideas. This is an important exercise for workers to get an understanding of what their colleagues are working on and to promote collaboration between two interested workers. This can inspire workers to go above and beyond their regular duties and can help each other out when the workload gets heavy or when issues start happening.