“When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.” — Joe Paterno
Is poor team performance your biggest nightmare that is haunting you? If your answer is yes, then do not worry because you are not alone. Most managers feel the same when their team starts to underperform. If you want your performance graph to show an upward trend, then you will have to identify the main causes of poor team performance and take measures to avoid them. That is what we will help you with in this article.
1. Ineffective Leadership
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” — Lao Tzu
According to a survey, 70% employees quit their jobs because of their bosses. There could be many reasons for your team poor performance and one of them is bad leader. Team members needs a clear direction, a mission and vision to follow but when they do not get all this, their performance starts to decline. Their motivation level dwindles and that reflects on your overall team performance.
If you want your team to perform well, then you must appoint a visionary leader that leads from the front. A good leader always inspire and guide a team to success by identifying and fixing problems leading to poor team performance. Give ideas that will help top management to take the right decision and inform them about your concerns.
2. Poor Team Selection
Even a visionary leader cannot do anything if he does not have the right team. In order to boost team performance, you need a combination of effective leadership and skilled team to overcome the challenges. Wrong team selection is another reason why your team performance is not up to the mark. That is where the role of human resource manager comes into play.
As a project manager, you need to work closely with the human resource department to hire the right people for the right job. Make sure that you hire people with diverse skills. You need to look beyond the academic qualification and look for soft skills to hire the right candidate. Thoroughly evaluate each candidate on multiple criteria and see whether he or she deserve to be a part of your team or not.
3. Stress
“Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started.”– David Allen
With so much on team To-Do list, your resources could bear the brunt of work related stress due to heavy workload. We all have experienced it throughout our careers. This could lead to poor work-life balance, which increases stress and anxiety level among employees. How could you expect your team member to perform at their best when they are under stress? You cannot.
If you want to see your team performance improve, then you should use team collaboration tools for company. With its intelligent task allocation mechanism, TaskQue balances the workload of your employees perfectly so that none of your team member is overwhelmed with heavy workload. By optimizing resource utilization, it will help your team to take their productivity to the next level.
4. Lack of Coordination
One of the most obvious reasons behind poor team performance is lack of coordination among your team members. There is nothing worse for a manager than to see all his team members moving in different direction. Add to that the personality differences, workplace conflicts, professional jealousy and politics and your teams is near disintegration let alone perform and perform well.
Use team collaboration software to ensure effective collaboration and coordination among all your team members. TaskQue comes preloaded with collaboration feature that allows you to conduct meetings with team members and clients. You can easily resolve the issues related to team coordination with these digital tools.
5. Inefficient Processes
Bottlenecks and loopholes in your current system and business process can hamper your team productivity. Excessive layers of hierarchy in an organization can make it extremely tough to get the approvals, which might lead to delays. As a result, your team productivity takes a hit. If you want to achieve your goals, it is imperative that you find out flaws in your processes and take necessary steps to fix those flaws before it can paralyze your productivity. Give your team a flawless process to follow and give your team performance a boost.
Conclusion
Your team performance can fluctuate from time to time because many external and internal factors affect it. To maintain and increase team performance, you should take advantage of technology. You can improve your team’s productivity and performance by streamlining and automating processes and ensuring smoother collaboration. If you know about any other reason that could lead to decline in team performance, feel free to share in comments section below.
