Workplace experts on how to improve your team productivity today

Is your team performing at its peak? Here’s what Australia’s smartest workplace experts say

By Roberto Damante September 8, 2022 6:32 am

The following tips are taken from Cuppa.tv’s free eBook, 10 Conversations To Elevate The Way You and Your Team Work. Cuppa.tv is the online streaming platform for conversations and masterclasses on wellbeing, performance and belonging for teams.

There are tonnes of productivity phone apps out there that can help transform the way you work, from organising your time, files and passwords, to even tracking your habits.

However, optimising productivity in the workplace ultimately comes down to the dynamic of a team and their leader. Being a team player or a leader is as much about being motivated to work towards a common goal as it is about being able to streamline the incoming tasks.

Here are four team productivity tips from some of the world’s leading experts:

1. Build trust by making it about them, not you

Robin Dreeke is a globally renowned behavioural expert who is a retired FBI Special Agent and Chief of the Counterintelligence Behavioural Analysis Program.

When it comes to getting the most out of a team, Dreeke says you must first acknowledge that humans are biologically programmed to want to belong to meaningful groups and to feel valued. Then it’s on you to figure out the priorities of others and speak to those unique concerns.

“Talk in terms of their priorities, seek their thoughts and opinions, validate them without judging them and giving them choices,” says Dreeke. “Figure out the goals and priorities of others. Be a resource for the success of others and make it about them.

“I always say, do these four things in everything you say and do in life, and the focus goes from you to them. The genetics in the brain rewards them. You do this with genuineness, sincerity, and transparency and you’re winning.”

These four things are:

Seek the thoughts and opinions of others instead of sharing yours.
Talk in terms of their priorities, their needs, wants, dreams, aspirations, personal and long term or short term goals instead of yours.
Validate them and who they are without judging them. Validation means you seek to understand, have non-judgemental curiosity.
Give them choices because people want a sense of control. So if you understand what your goals and priorities are, you understand theirs when you empower people with choices, they will overlap.

2. Don’t convince. Inspire!

Robin Dreeke. Image: Supplied.

Being a team player or a strong leader is listed on almost every job description, but being able to affect change to draw the best out of your team comes down to an ability to inspire.

The secret sauce of inspiring others in a nutshell is to remember that it is not about convincing them.

As Robin Dreeke points out, “convincing is about me and my ideas – ask yourself ‘how can I inspire’. Inspiration has to come from within you”.

Rather than trying to convince someone, Dreeke explains that it is more important to inspire someone to want to do something. Thinking about how to inspire someone is a massive mindshift and aligns to what the other person’s priorities are, which changes the focus and works towards offering up the resources more in tune to what is important to someone else.

3. Motivate with three levers

Dr Amber Imber is an organisational psychologist and founder of behavioural science consultancy, Inventium. Through understanding how people work and collaborate, Dr Imber emphasises the importance of self-determination theory “which basically says there are three levers that we can pull out… when we’re struggling with motivation or when we say someone in our team is struggling with motivation”.

The first is autonomy and considering how you can give people more autonomy on how they work or when they work with both freedom and flexibility? Dr Imber explains that “micromanaging someone is a really great way to kill motivation because it reduces autonomy”.

Dr Amantha Imber. Image: Supplied.

The second lever to pull is ‘mastery’ which is when “we’ve got the opportunity to be learning and mastering new skills and also that we feel challenged by the work that we do”.

“If you are working in a job that you feel like you can do with your eyes closed, that’s a motivation killer and that probably would be a reason to have a chat with your boss and ask: Can you give me some more challenging work? That would be a reason to go and look for more challenging work,” Dr Imber explains.

The third lever is connection and finding opportunities to have social connection, “like having social phone calls with friends scattered throughout the workday”, says Dr Imber.

4. Make recognition ‘a way of being’

Colleen Callander. Image: Supplied.

How important is recognition in developing a strong culture? Colleen Callander was the former CEO of Sportsgirl and now a highly sought-after keynote speaker and thought leader who believes that recognition is crucial in building confidence in people.

“If you are a leader and responsible for people, you are also responsible for a culture that people want to get up to every single day,” Callander says. “It’s a way of being and it’s bloody hard. But so worth it”.

While free lunches and nice car parks are a nice thing to have, Callander is quick to point that these things are not building culture.

“Culture is not something you can buy off the shelf or send out a positive affirmation once a week”.

Having a team perform at their best and building the right culture is hugely important to build a “confidence muscle”. And while there is no magic recipe to culture, Callander explains that “culture is something that you have to build every single day”.

Read more from Australia’s leading workplace thought leaders in Cuppa.tv’s free eBook, 10 Conversations To Elevate The Way You and Your Team Work: