How Should Managers Deal With Breakdowns in Workplace Efficiency?

Most of the advice you’ll see centered around optimizing efficiency focuses on how to make a functional team do better work. But what should you do when things have already gone off the rails? How do you restore order and efficiency when a team dynamic has already broken down or individual productivity levels have been dwindling? If you’ve got to rally a dysfunctional team or re-engineer managerial logistics, here are some of the most important things that you can do to turn things around.

Reevaluate Workflow

Problems with inefficiencies could be widespread and manifest in one form or another throughout an entire company. Alternatively, inefficiencies could be concentrated to single departments or individuals. As a manager, you need to critically evaluate how each aspect of your team’s work affects the team overall. It may be appropriate to tweak the distribution of work to spread responsibilities out more equitably. Using workflow automation programs can help you track the progression of work. With automation analytics, you can identify discrepancies and determine whether your team is hitting output standards.

Assess Staffing Needs

After you’ve carefully analyzed how you’re managing labor logistics, you may find that there aren’t simply enough hands on deck. One of the most common reasons why people aren’t satisfactorily efficient in job roles is that their average workday encompasses more responsibilities than employers are reconciling.

While it’s okay to have your key staff members wear more than one hat, they can’t very well try to wear ten. Overloading your most capable employees is a major misuse of one of your most valuable assets, and it could even bring about an epidemic of employee burnout. Ultimately, getting more personnel on your roster could give your current staff some breathing room while also breathing new life into your organizational productivity.

Be Accountable

Accountability in the workplace should be at the core of any business’ values. You want to create an environment in which employee understand expectations from them and are capable of recognizing when their work has failed to meet applicable standards.

To create a culture of accountability, one of the first things that you need to do is model it. Managers should never deflect responsibility for breakdowns in communication or performance. Give careful thought to why things haven’t been going well and be honest with yourself about what you can do to make a difference. When people own their mistakes or even mistakes that weren’t wholly theirs, it commands respect and inspires your workforce to do the same.

Give People Substantive Performance Reviews

People tend to know when their work is falling short and they usually know why. How to get better may not be so obvious. You should be giving your staff feedback in a meaningful way that also incorporates their own. Let them identify issues, and then your role in coaching and counseling can be solution-oriented.

Even when you can’t commend people on stellar performance, you can still make getting a performance review a positive experience. Giving people your vote of confidence that they can improve could be a big motivator for them. A confrontation about a performance problem doesn’t need to be adversarial. You and the person who you’re counseling share an interest in resolving the problems that you need to address. Once you make clear that’s your goal and you express your support, they’ll be highly receptive to your input.

Ask Staff for Feedback

Your team members are going to be a valuable source of insight for improving workplace conditions and infrastructure. When something is gumming up the works, the people on the front lines will be the most capable of telling you exactly where and how. Likewise, they’ll probably have some of the best ideas on facilitating repairs or improvements.

Once you’ve implemented measures aimed at stepping up productivity, you need to devise ways to monitor who effectively they’re working. Use metrics that give you a good sense of what efficiency directives are panning out and which may still need some refinement.