No matter how much you might enjoy your work, there will be days when getting up and going into the office just feels like it’s too much. These are days when you just aren’t productive, and you know that any goals you set are unlikely to be reached. These days can make everything feel so much harder, and whether they come about through exhaustion, a lack of enjoyment in what you’re doing, or simply because you don’t understand the task ahead of you, we’ll all feel like this from time to time.
However, if you are a manager and you have a team to take care of, knowing that this is how some of them will feel once in a while (or perhaps all the time) is important. When you know this, you can put as many measures in place as possible to ensure that your team is as productive as possible at all times. Read on to find out what you can do.
Make Sure They Take Breaks
If you consider how best for you and your team to be productive, you might initially think that you need to work at full tilt from beginning to end of a project. Unfortunately, although this is often what people think, the truth is that this can be harmful. It can cause burnout, and it can mean that the end result is not as polished as it could or should be.
The best thing to do is take plenty of breaks. Ideally, you’ll need to step away from your work at least once every hour for around ten minutes. When you do this and take a walk around the office, go and grab a cup of coffee, use the bathroom, or enjoy a relaxing sit down on a giant bean bag chair in the break room, you’ll reset your brain, re-engage your thinking, and reinvigorate your body. It might surprise you to find just how much more productive everyone can be when they take breaks, even though they are technically working for a shorter amount of time.
Break Up Tasks into Manageable Chunks
If you give your team members a job to do, and that job is something that you think will take all day and is fairly complex, you might find that the people doing the work feel overwhelmed. This can happen even if they are experts in their field and know exactly what to do; being presented with a big job and a timeframe to work in is always going to be stressful. The problem is, this can lead to a drop in productivity.
The best thing to do is to take that same big task and break it up into smaller, more easily achievable chunks. Of course, each of these smaller jobs will also have a separate deadline, and the end result should be that the original project is all completed in the same timeframe as you wanted it to be, but your team will be more comfortable doing it. This is because they can work on one task at a time, complete it, and move on to the next, rather than having to tackle everything all at once.
