Improving Your Office Productivity

Work from home

Is working in an office going out of style? I’ve heard from several people lately that telecommuting is the best thing that ever happened to their productivity, and opting out of their distracting work environments has made them better employees.

I don’t doubt that’s true, but I’m not sure that having employees work from home is the best answer for every company. In fact, I’m quite certain that most of us could gain a lot from streamlining our internal processes and taking a more ruthless look at how we waste one another’s time.

We’ve all worked in offices where constant – and often trivial – interruptions from coworkers are the norm, team meetings drag out interminably, and it’s nearly impossible to stay focused long enough to finish a task (let alone complete all the items on our to-do list).

I think there’s a better way – and I want to share four small changes that have made huge impacts on how our company’s employees use their time.

1. Use instant messaging to communicate about time-sensitive matters.

We all keep an IM program running all day so that we can respond quickly to questions posed by our colleagues. IM has several big advantages over face-to-face conversation:

• It allows you to set a status message. If you really don’t want to be disturbed, you can let people know that before they interrupt you.
• Although it’s delivered immediately, you have the option of ignoring it for a minute while you finish the task you’re working on.
• It’s less disruptive to the rest of the team. They don’t have to listen to (or try to block out) your conversation.

2. Share to-do lists for assigning & sharing work.

We use Manymoon, a free online service that allows us to create tasks and assign them to other team members (along with due dates, notes and project details), so that the tasks simply show up in their to-do list whenever they refresh it. When we switched to a shared task list system, the amount of internal chatter (both verbal and email) was reduced significantly. We love it because:

• It cuts down enormously on interruptions and on internal emails. Rather than walking over to someone’s desk & asking them to do something, I can simply add it to their task list and let them respond to the request when they’re reviewing their priorities for the day.
• It allows us to organize, prioritize, and set deadlines on tasks – all of which are impossible when tasks are assigned via email. (Zenhabits has a great post on why inboxes make terrible to-do lists, which I encourage you to read if you’re not yet convinced about that.)
• It’s easy to reassign a task to someone else, leave comments, attach documents, and so on.
• Tasks can be grouped by project, allowing you to focus in on a particular set of goals.

3. Have daily – but very short – team meetings.

Software developers have come up with a brilliant framework for team meetings called scrum, and we’ve adopted it for our own use. The idea is simple: You hold a 10-minute standing meeting every day (ideally at an odd time of day — we have it at 9:50 am each day), during which each attendee answers three questions:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you doing today?
• Is anything standing in your way?

The genius of it is manyfold, but it’s key to remember that the third question should only be answered in a yes/no fashion. If someone is experiencing a roadblock, it can be addressed after scrum, but that conversation should only involve the person in question and their project manager (or whoever can help them with their roadblock).

I can think of few companies that wouldn’t benefit from taking a similar approach to team meetings. You’ll find that your meetings are shorter, more efficient, and most importantly, incredibly useful. Rather than everyone sitting around, watching the clock, you’ll get your team back to their desks with a clear set of priorities and even a little energy boost thanks to standing up for a few minutes.

4. Keep internal email to a minimum.

One of the biggest advantages to the above processes is that they’ve reduced our email substantially. Rather than wading through overflowing inboxes, most of my staff (client-facing people aside) have pretty minimal work-related email these days. Once minor requests (which can be handled via IM), task management (which go to Manymoon) and project updates (which we cover at scrum) are taken out of the picture, you’ll be amazed how few emails are actually required.

And once the inbox gets smaller, the amount of time everyone spends simply monitoring email & responding to it goes way down. The productivity gains here can be enormous.

Other ideas

Our next projects are moving to shared calendaring and a shared contact manager, but those are proving to be more substantial undertakings, so we’re moving a bit slowly. If you’ve got tips to share on improving your team productivity, I’d love to hear them – please post them in the comments.

And I should add that it’s also critical to keep some sense of spontaneity and fun in the office. No one likes to work with a bunch of hyper-efficient zombies who never talk. But I’ve found everyone really appreciates being able to dive into their work when they need to – and YouTube links can be sent by IM, too…