Forming a group of productive employees is one of the most desired goals in any company, but also an elusive objective for the vast majority of businesses. According to the research, as much as 70% of American workers do not feel they are engaged at work.
It’s not easy to find, hire, and nurture an agile employee. By definition, agile working is about bringing people, processes, connectivity and technology, time, and place together to find the most appropriate and effective way of working to carry out a particular task.
If you want to keep your company stable and highly efficient long-term, you need to ensure a flawless workflow. In this post, we will show you 9 ways to create more agile teams of employees.
1. Hire the right team
The first step in this process is to hire a group of people who can follow your mission and contribute to the successful implementation of the business strategy. It’s not enough to select candidates based only on their resumes and previous experiences.
On the contrary, you need to conduct a thorough interview with each applicant, analyze their personalities, and test their skills in a real-life environment. This is the basic precondition for creating agile teams because professionals who don’t meet your requirements can hardly ever reach the desired level of efficiency.
2. Let them feel appreciated
Now that you’ve chosen the right people for the project, you should start nurturing healthy relationships within your team. You need to show each member of the group that you appreciate his or her contribution, allowing them to freely express ideas and creativity.
Don’t clip their wings immediately – your job is to let employees show you what they can do and see how to take advantage of their skills. This will make everyone more satisfied, which is extremely important as happiness proved to make people 12% more productive.
3. Demonstrate leadership
As much as you want your employees to feel free and relaxed, you still need to take the lead role and show them where they ought to go and how to do it most efficiently. As the leader, you must be a role model for the entire unit and prove agile approach and style of work.
Don’t leave people making big decisions alone – you need to step up and help them find the best way out of the situation. Besides that, a leader has to keep an eye on employees and highlight potential shortcomings, so they can react and solve the problem.
4. Embrace diversity
Good teams don’t always consist of likeminded people. As the matter of fact diversity is often the factor that makes the best companies better than competitors.
Pearlie Ferguson, an HR manager at Best Essays, said that professional diversity is not exclusively a question of race or ethnic belonging: “On the contrary, it is all about the freedom and individualism. The point is to learn how to embrace different personalities and allow employees to do their jobs in a way that suits their own habits and characters, not yours”.
5. Make your team accountable
Since you allow employees to act independently, you must also make them accountable for their actions. It’s a natural part of the work process because people want to know who is responsible for certain actions and who is accountable for the consequences of those actions. This makes workers much more agile as they know that you’ll be monitoring their actions.
6. Measure results
Speaking of actions and consequences, you should find the way to measure results of each team member individually. Make a list of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that everyone has to achieve and then follow their work regularly.
It means you need to conduct periodical analysis to make sure that your team is productive, completing projects professionally and in a timely manner. Regular measurements are crucial because they give you valuable business insights, so you can act quickly in case something goes wrong or somebody is slowing you down.
7. Track time
Time tracking is one of the most accurate indicators of professional agility, so you should pay special attention to this feature. The best way to do so is to use digital tools:
- Hours: This tool makes real-time tracking easy by keeping a running list of timers that you can switch between with one tap. It allows teams to quickly identify mistakes and make adjustments to increase productivity.
- Top Tracker: It’s an app that enables you to easily identify areas for improvement with real-time summaries of your productivity across projects and your team’s performance.
- Timely: Timely allows you to combine scheduling and time tracking, making your team more agile in the long run.
8. Use project management tools
Project management tools can give a big boost to the overall employee efficiency. They automate much of the boring and repetitive work, leaving you with enough time to focus on more important tasks. At the same time, project management software such as Jira or Trello enable you to organize and prioritize projects, discuss your team’s work in full context with complete visibility, and improve team performance based on real-time visual data.
9. Foster organizational communication
Although digital tools are a huge help for managers who want to make employees more agile, you should not neglect the power of organizational communication. Encourage your workers to brainstorm ideas, share opinions, and solve problems in close cooperation.
You should regularly organize face-to-face meetings to find out more about their plans, proposals, or potential difficulties. This way, everyone will be satisfied and willing to give their best for the company.
Running a company is not easy, particularly if you don’t manage a team of agile employees. If you want to ensure business success and profitability in the long run, you have to find a way to keep your workers productive.
In this post, I’ve highlighted 9 ways to create more agile teams. Do you already use some of these methods? Do you have other interesting suggestions to share?
Author
Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner has had a successful career in hospitality sales, real estate, and recruitment. In 1999, she founded HRM Resolutions, a strategic human resource consultancy, and later became a founding recruiter and investor at RecruitLoop.
