The Many Benefits of Productivity Planning in the Workplace
The ability to plan out your week or month ahead of time can lead to a significant increase in productivity, allowing you to foresee and plan for potential speed bumps rather than simply hitting them and having to scramble for a solution. Planning out your time gives your business a realistic strategy for the short-term, letting you complete projects on time and manage the stress of your workforce. When you have a plan, your team is prepared for various possibilities and can lay out strategies that help you pivot and overcome any challenges that may arise. With the pandemic economy, being prepared to pivot is more essential now than ever before.
Without a productivity plan, your business is heading into the future completely blind, making you more susceptible to being railroaded. No business wants to get caught up in a difficult situation without a plan or strategy - with a productivity plan, this becomes easier to handle. While the concept may seem simple, the majority of offices don’t have any sort of regular productivity plan. They typically exist in production and manufacturing, allowing teams to hit major deadlines and milestones on time while taking into account potential challenges along the way.
The argument for productivity planning in an office
Taking a little time at the beginning of each month to plot out a roadmap for your department will set you up for success. Looking ahead to what the immediate future could hold lets you anticipate challenges that your workforce might encounter during any period, making it far easier to plan for how to overcome them, and enabling your business with a proactive strategy rather than a reactive one. In essence, a productivity plan lets you spend your time more effectively.
Creating a productivity plan is easy, and takes very little time to complete when you consider the amount of time you’ll save by having one. It essentially involves looking at what your business needs to do, when it needs to be done, and how it is going to happen. All you and your team have to do is plot out the projects and other work due during the month in question, listing them out by due date. Each project should feature the members of your team assigned to work on them, their priority level, as well as the time available to you as a manager. Once all this is accounted for, you’ll have the what, who, and how of your productivity plan.
From there, you’ll be able to focus on the bigger picture and foresee potential challenges that may arise to complicate each project or delay their completion, giving you the opportunity to plan for these possibilities and chart out how you’ll react to them. This might include reallocating resources to ensure that projects are completed on time, reassigning members of your team to work on projects that better suit their style of work, spending your free time assisting teams in need, or even pushing a project due date back if there just isn’t time.
How to make productivity planning a breeze
Productivity planning isn’t something you’ll excel at right from the get go, but with the help of a couple of key tools, you’ll be able to plan for the months ahead seamlessly. The first tool you should seriously consider using is a project management tool like Monday.com, Asana, Trello, or similar. Why one of these tools? Managing projects on a calendar simply isn’t enough - these tools let you assign team members to tasks and show you who may have too much - or too little - on their plate.
Project management software solutions are a perfect way for you to visualize your upcoming schedule, making it easy to begin planning for how you’ll meet deadlines and deal with challenges. With many of these tools, you’ll be able to chart the lifespan of a specific project, and keep track of tasks that need to be completed and who is completing them, and so much more. Project management solutions offer an easier way for you to monitor your productivity plan, saving you time and effort by making the process easier than a pen and paper or manual approach.
Once you’ve laid out what your month looks like and have worked on a plan that will allow your team to accomplish its goals, you’ll need to be able to track the overall effectiveness of your team members. Productivity intelligence tools like Prodoscore will give you insight into your team’s performance, allowing you to better understand how teams work together and whether some reshuffling is needed to improve effectiveness.
Prodoscore measures employee activity in common workplace solutions like Google Workspace, Office 365, MS Teams, RingCentral, Salesforce and other CRMs, and many other tools, assigning each employee a unique productivity score. These scores can be used to compare employees to teams and individuals, track the growth and progress of workers, measure cloud tool adoption, and get a feel for what is and isn’t working in the workplace.
With Prodoscore in your arsenal, you’ll have unparalleled visibility into the habits of your workforce, allowing you to quickly pivot and build stronger teams in order to meet tight deadlines and complete complex projects. Along the way, you’ll find that workplace morale is boosted because of a streamlined employee experience, workers are happier and more satisfied due to recognition of their efforts, and that your workforce is stronger and more productive as a result.
Planning out time for projects and everyday tasks each month ensures that employees don’t get overwhelmed and can prioritize in an effective way. Avoid rushed emails and last-minute work that isn’t the best your company can produce with productivity planning.
Contact us today for a demonstration of how Prodoscore can help improve your project management and planning process.
