Have you ever ever wondered how Apple went from near-bankruptcy to $300bn+ in annual revenue?
Or why Nokia was capable of pivot its way through the smartphone era while Blackberry floundered?
Or why Cisco routinely ranks top-five within the “Great Place To Work” list, and why 91% of staff feel their workplace is psychologically and emotionally healthy?
It seems these household names share a standard trait that virtually any company can develop, no matter size, industry or money within the bank.
That’s the flexibility to construct and nurture high-performing teams.
Apple, Nokia, Cisco and countless others have developed a resilience that seems like magic, but is actually a lesson any leader can carry into 2024. The lesson is that while individual brilliance is at all times precious, the true competitive edge lies in collaborative success.
With burnout rates hovering at an all-time high and most major markets still shaky, establishing and nurturing high-performing teams has never been more vital.
Nonetheless, it’s not something that appears overnight or by accident. Rethinking worker performance requires a deliberate, designed and enduring effort.
An actionable guide to making a multiplier effect for worker performance
On this guide, we’re sharing a data-backed blueprint to aid you:
- Understand the characteristics of high-performing teams
- Discover strengths and gaps in your organization
- Develop strategies to nurture a culture of collaborative excellence
- Increase productivity without burning out your best people
- Leverage technology to achieve actionable insights
From understanding the foundational characteristics of high-performing teams to implementing cutting-edge tools and methods for sustained productivity increases, we’ll explore transform your workforce.
The 4 pillars of high-performing teams
Every strong team is built on a foundation that emphasizes team performance over individual achievements.
The shift from rockstars to supergroups is rooted in recognizing that the challenges and nature of labor have modified. Individual effort was a trademark of the pre-tech revolution era, but collaboration is the one solution to succeed today.
1. Shared purpose
Personal values and connection to organizational purpose have turn into increasingly vital in recent times.
McKinsey’s research found that 70% of individuals derive a way of purpose from work. So it’s worrying that only 15% of employees and frontline managers agreed they will ‘live their purpose’ in every day work. Worse still, 49% disagreed entirely (the remaining 36% were neutral).
Individuals who get purpose from their work are more engaged, connected, committed, satisfied and excited at work.
Although purpose is admittedly hard to quantify and convey, there are a couple of things managers can do here:
- Make sure the organization’s purpose is evident, meaningful, and actively integrated into decision-making processes.
That is greater than a mission statement; it requires a real commitment from senior executives to make use of the corporate’s purpose as a tenet, each internally and in society.
- Encourage personal reflection from all levels
A culture of compassionate leadership and psychological safety is one where employees are comfortable sharing their personal purpose. This approach significantly enhances the likelihood of employees finding success of their work. Managers must turn into role models for sharing personal purpose in the event that they hope to construct a highly engaged, high-performing team.
- Embed purpose into every day work
This might include aligning their roles with the corporate’s broader purpose or encouraging them to contribute ideas that resonate with their values. For instance, initiatives where employees can connect with the corporate’s core customer base may be highly effective at reminding employees why their work matters.
2. Skills and talents
High-performing teams draw strength from a various skill set. These teams leverage each member’s unique strengths and competencies, making a synergy that outperforms individual efforts to attain shared goals.
- Discover and appreciate individual strengths
What does every person within the team bring to the table? A comprehensive assessment of their skills, experience and areas of experience helps assign responsibilities aligning with every person’s capabilities.
- Address individual weaknesses
This doesn’t mean trying to remodel everyone into an all-around expert. As a substitute, it’s about identifying areas where additional support, training or encouragement will help team members overcome obstacles and work on specific skills.
- Conducting a symphony of skills
Truly effective managers can leverage individual strengths to amplify the team’s collective capabilities. When team members complement one another’s skills and expertise, ideas form and flow higher, knowledge is shared openly, and cooperative problem-solving happens naturally – all hallmarks of high-performing teams.
This insight also scales to the organizational level. Take Cisco, for example. In 2001, facing disruption from a rapidly advancing IT sector, Cisco proactively established cross-functional teams to enhance collaboration and creativity throughout all the organization. The end result? Cisco stays a heavyweight in IT and communications nearly 20 years later, thanks in no small part to the agility arising from this cross-functional effort.
- Making a culture of recognition
In response to Gallup and Workhuman, employees who think their organization does a very good job recognizing contributions are 3.8 times more more likely to feel connected to the corporate culture.
Here’s a tip: amongst employees who feel recognized at work, 72% say their organization notices the ‘little things’ in addition to big-picture progress. Moderately than waiting for annual performance reviews to roll around, proactive managers must have regular check-ins with their team that include recognition for private and collaborative contributions.
3. Clear communication
Open, honest communication encourages a culture of collaborative innovation and helps employees ‘live their purpose’ at work. Clear, targeted communication gets things done.
High-performing teams have a system to balance each varieties of communication. Establishing processes and expectations for effective communication – while also encouraging open dialogue and transparency – creates an ecosystem where trust, collaboration, and innovation thrive.
Clear protocols on when and use specific channels make communication transparent and effective. For instance, Slack is healthier for quick, informal conversations, while comments in Asana should prioritize task management and progress tracking. Staying organized wards off communication fatigue and prevents information from being lost in a flood of messages.
- Construct trust in transparency
A psychologically protected environment is one where team members feel comfortable sharing feedback without fear of judgment or reprisal. This implies encouraging employees to talk openly, but provided that leaders are open to receiving and acting on feedback.
- Provide regular, value-added feedback
Balancing constructive criticism and positive reinforcement keeps employees motivated by reminding them that their contributions matter. manager does this weekly and even every day, not annually. The difference is access to reliable real-time workforce analytics that permits managers and employees to have productive conversations and uncover actionable insights about living projects.
- Use data to tell decisions
Integrating workforce analytics into project management and worker performance tracking is an efficient solution to create transparency and level the playing field in development discussions. Reliable data not only removes bias from the equation but additionally gives employees clarity to self-manage their performance.
The important thing takeaway for managers is that radical candor and banter are good for morale, but work still must get done.
Every high-performing team has its communication style. More vital than the particular tools and channels your team uses is the workflow that links them together.
Because of this integrations between communication, worker productivity and project management platforms are increasingly becoming essential. Integrations enable seamless data sharing, eliminating communication siloes and furnishing everyone with the most effective available information.
4. Trust in leadership
Worker performance is directly linked to the trust people put in leadership.
That’s the message from Gallup, backed up by data that shows trusting employees are 4 times more more likely to be engaged at work and 58% less more likely to be looking for an additional job.
This trust builds businesses. PwC’s 2023 Trust Survey found that 91% of executives agreed their ability to construct and retain trust would profit the corporate’s bottom line.
Nonetheless, that very same survey found a 14 percentage point gap between what number of executives thought their employees trusted them (79%) and what number of actually did (65%).
One big reason for the mismatch likely has to do with misunderstandings between worker motivators and employer demands. While employees repeatedly call for flexibility (particularly in the shape of hybrid schedules, with evidence that flexibility increases productivity), firms are tightening the reins.
Managers of high-performing teams work hard to construct trust. Listed here are a couple of of the ways they do it:
- Working with employees to implement flexible policies
- Maintaining oversight without micromanaging
- Walking the talk on transparent communication
- Involving employees in decision-making
- Recognizing worker contributions
- Developing empathy to grasp their team’s individual motivators
- Modelling a commitment to company culture
- Escalating worker feedback
On the organizational level, giving managers independence to construct a bespoke high-performing team can be vital. For instance, Apple’s team structure under Steve Jobs was traditionally hierarchical, however the spoke-and-wheel structure introduced during Tim Cook’s leadership has undoubtedly contributed to the corporate’s $350-plus-billion-dollar revenue.
Using technology to reinforce collaboration
We are able to’t speak about high-performing teams, worker performance and increased productivity without talking about tech.
If purpose, skills, communication and trust are the pillars of high-performing teams, then technology is the beam connecting them. Without the best technology, organizations will experience gaps in perception and feedback that ultimately hurt performance.
The way to put money into technology in 2024
The suitable technology can increase productivity and enhance worker performance, but only when it’s strategically implemented to match your organization’s need, structure and ecosystem.
Before investing in latest technology, run through these easy steps to see whether the tool meets your small business needs:
- Make clear the organizational need for brand new or improved technology
- Map the ecosystem to discover dependent, defunct or underperforming processes
- Define the present gaps in technological capability
- Discover opportunities to upgrade, integrate or improve existing software
- Assess employees’ capabilities and supply training if crucial
You would possibly find that the most effective technology is the one you have already got.
Nonetheless, if there continues to be a necessity for brand new tech and a business case for worker performance in spite of everything these steps, we’ve one final tip. Provided that a mean of one-third (33%) of SaaS licenses are barely used or not used in any respect and 88% of executives fail to capture value from legacy technology, it’s value identifying wastage to release budget for brand new tools.
Balancing productivity with well-being
While we’ve been busy constructing the pillars of high-performing teams, one crucial factor has been hovering within the background: worker well-being.
Burnout rates are still too high, with 57% of US employees experiencing “a minimum of moderate” levels. At the identical time, 42% of operational executives feel the pressure of labor shortages.
Even though it may appear counter-intuitive to take into consideration constructing a high-performing team on this environment, we consider the strategies outlined above are the reply to those challenges.
Nonetheless, managers must remain attentive to work-life balance issues. The pursuit of increased productivity and recognition for outstanding performance is a slippery slope towards overwork.
Are you able to boost worker performance in 2024?
High-performing teams work efficiently and effectively to maneuver the needle on organizational goals. They support one another. They play to one another’s strengths. They turn into greater than the sum of their parts, reducing the reliance on individual efforts and achieving more because of this.
Constructing this sort of high-performance engine is the important thing to navigating the inevitable challenges 2024 has in store and emerging stronger at the opposite end.
The excellent news is that the majority organizations have already got the engine components. What’s missing is the tune-up.
Take the time to map the pillars we discussed here against your workplace. What’s missing? What’s already working, and what may very well be improved? How do your team’s individual strengths come together, and what does that seem like on the organizational scale?
While constructing a high-performing team may appear to be a talent reserved for the Apples and Ciscos of the world, it’s a skill that any empathetic leader can learn and repeat.
By implementing the strategies outlined here, and investing in workforce analytics to measure the outcomes in real-time, any organization can cultivate an environment where employees outperform every benchmark.
