Managing a team is no easy task. With an extensive list of tasks to do, including day-to-day performance and ensuring that you’re getting the best out of your team; it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
Whilst feeling overwhelmed is not abnormal, it’s important not to let this lead to letting important aspects slip through the cracks – like training and professional development, for example, Employing an approach that integrates these aspects into your daily processes is a great way to ensure that both you and your team are equipped to tackle challenges and grow steadily.
#1 A FOCUS ON PRODUCTIVITY
Your primary focus should be to keep the members of your team productive and eagerly working towards shared goals. Truly productive teams are more than just equipped with the right skills and tools. They’re engaged, eager, and creative.
In order for your team to keep productive, however, you’ll need to provide them with the skills and support they need to do their work optimally, every day.
Team productivity can often be achieved through a balance of training, development, and engaging opportunities. With the recent shift from in-office workspaces to many employees working from home, online learning can be a great way to increase team engagement whilst teaching new skills and techniques.
#2 NURTURING AND REWARDING SKILLS
As a manager, it’s important to spend some time talking to your team about new skills and ideas; but it’s just as important to recognize where your team members are already skills and highly capable. These skills should be encouraged and nourished.
This is where online learning can become a powerful tool yet again. Online learning isn’t just about learning new skills, it’s an effective means of reinforcing skills and value that your team members are bringing to the table.
Once you’ve implemented online learning, a great way to keep the ball rolling is by rewarding knowledge and improvement with incentives. These could be anything from physical prizes to a coveted top position on your online training leaderboards. It’s important to identify incentives that are important to your team members, to ensure that they will work as a form of meaningful reward and recognition.
#3 DRIVING COLLABORATION
Teams thrive when team members can collaborate with one another. Unfortunately, in the post-pandemic workspaces, office culture appears to be considerably more subdued. This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to create a great culture and a space where team members can collaborate with each other confidently. There are numerous online learning solutions that can be tailored to create a collaborative, more social-friendly, digital workspace for your teams.
Incorporating elements such as group tasks, online team builds, and shared experiences can be a valuable asset in creating a collaborative team. This form of digital training can work as the ideal solution when teams are working from home, the office, or a hybrid model.
#4 FINDING (AND KEEPING) TALENT
As a manager, you should always keep one eye open for new talent to develop and grow your team. Implementing a practical strategy can be the most effective way of finding and retaining top talent for your team.
Employers often struggle to find talent with the right skills for their teams. This is where a team culture of training and development can add value in more ways than one:
Today’s workforce wants to work somewhere where they will feel valued, encouraged, and provided opportunities to learn and grow. Online training works as a great solution by creating a meaningful addition to everything you have to offer.
Secondly, a great training strategy means that your team’s skills are constantly growing and developing, leaving you room to focus your recruitment efforts on those hard-to-find (but just as important) soft skills.
#5 IMPROVING EMPLOYEE WELLBEING
Last (but not least), the mental well-being of your team is vital. During the rise of the pandemic, the importance of both mental and physical wellbeing has been highlighted, and a workplace focus on employee wellbeing has increased significantly.
This does link partly to embedding a great company culture, which means listening to your team members and taking actionable steps to help them thrive. But it’s also important to place a focus on removing unnecessary stress – so that employees have the capacity to focus on what really matters to them.
Your online training and development solutions can also be tailored to reduce stress and promote a reduced-stress environment. By including content that’s fun, bite-sized, and relevant, you’re ensuring that online learning isn’t just another task that drains your employees’ energy. Online learning should be something they can jump into when they need to, for a quick burst of new ideas and inspiration.
These five elements can assist any manager in employing an approach to team management that provides an opportunity for both you and your team to tackle challenges and grow steadily towards your goals.
Supreme Staffing Group – Superior People, Superior Service
Connecting businesses and the people who drive them.
