How your team works together
What are the work practices of high performance flexible teams?
What are the rhythms that form the backbone of an effective team’s work week?
Which of these work productivity hacks would work for your team?
Core hours
Regular core contact hours on working days ensure the team can schedule inclusive meetings. All team meetings, planning and communications should occur within these times. Typically, core hours are 10am-2pm.
Collaboration times
These are moments where it’s important to collaborate. Eg. brainstorming sessions or team workshops.
What are the best times for your team that take into account the different work patterns/schedules of each team member. How could you collaborate remotely?
Focus time
A great hack for improving individual and team productivity is to introduce the concept of “focus time”.
This encourages people to schedule in chunks of time (1-4 hours) where they plan to do uninterrupted work. Colleagues respect each other’s focus time and aim not to interrupt each other during these scheduled times.
Did you know?
When Microsoft Japan went to a 4-day work week, their productivity went up by 40%.
One step was to cut average meeting times from 60 minutes to 30 — and set a limit of 5 people per meeting!
Meetings
When a team is working flexibly, they are often a lot more efficient with their time. Meetings just for the sake of meetings simply won’t fly.
Reducing time in meetings frees up everyone to do more of their best individual or project work, and can significantly increase productivity.
Consider: reducing the time of each meeting, the people who need to join, sending an agenda with a purpose and using meeting time for rich discussion.