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Teamwork always encourages creativity and helps to enhance the overall productivity of employees. Isn’t it true that “There is immense power when a group of people with similar interests gets together to work toward the same goals?” Having said that, many times, you may face some challenges that can turn your experience of working in a team as frustrating. This can be because of various reasons such as project or resource management misses, etc. Some organizations implement work scheduling apps or resource management software to manage or reduce teamwork-related challenges or issues. The only way to optimize your resources is by managing your people and team well and avoiding common team management mistakes. Let’s look at some common team management challenges and what are the best possible solutions for those.
1. Lack of collaboration
No or less collaboration can be a huge challenge for project managers. There may be some team members who are of have temperament issues or some who may be arrogant and not easy to deal with. There can be issues between employees and their team leads or at times, there may be communication gaps between different team members, which results in misses of timelines or clarity of requirements. Working in a distributed team also causes a lack of collaboration because of different time zones.
Solution: Though there may be various reasons for the lack of collaboration in a team, however, identifying the root cause is important to fix the actual challenge. To overcome the issue of lack of collaboration, the first step is to ensure seamless and effective communication. This can be done by having one-on-one sessions, frequent team meeting, and finding what interests them. Getting to know your team members also helps build trust and better teamwork. Also, implementing resource management software helps employees to collaborate, and share data, files, etc. easily.
2. Building trust
Having trust in your team is very important to build better relationships and achieving teamwork. Team leads often miss this point and don’t work on building trust which de-motivates their team. If there is trust and good bonding between team members, then the work environment will be positive and will be characterized by mutual respect where everyone will be comfortable being themselves. Having said that, mostly, this is very tough to achieve in reality.
Solution: Team leaders and managers should aim to break down barriers and encourage building trust within the team. When your employees feel valued and appreciated, it becomes very easy to foster interpersonal relationships.
3. Downward trend in performance
Another team management mistake is when an individual or team’s performance goes down. There could be many possible factors that cause low performance such as stress, over-burden, no or less clarity of goals, toxic work environment, no motivation, etc. All this affects the performance of your staff and can lead to bigger damage to your business.
Solution: Clearly communicating expectations, goals, and priorities and linking targets to appraisal, incentives, or promotion opportunities can make a huge difference. Besides that, managers should aim to review staff performance at regular intervals. For this, a work scheduling app can be very beneficial. You can assign tasks, schedule deadlines, and track status, and performance too. Such a tool can also help in finding the actual reasons for a dip in performance, which can then help you fix it. In addition, providing timely feedback to employees, helping them improve their productivity by training or upskilling, and offering rewards and recognitions go a long way too.
4. Failure to Delegate
Another top reason pr a management mistake is when people fail to delegate tasks to others. Most of the time, supervisors or team leads may feel that it is simply easier to do the task yourself rather than spend time training someone. Failing to delegate could further lead to many challenges. For example, tasks will get delayed as if everything is on one plate of one person vis-à-vis other team members. In addition, if things are not delegated, the staff would never get trained and learn.
Solution: Project managers can make clear checklists for what to and how to do and best practices and guidelines to make it easy to delegate work to their team. They can also conduct regular team huddles and status-check meetings to maintain accountability for the team’s work assignments. If needed, managers must also be ready to help the team members in achieving the delegated tasks and provide encouragement and guidance. A work scheduling app is very useful in dividing the workload and delegating tasks between the team.
5. Unclear goals
If the organizational or project goals are not clear, it becomes difficult for the staff to function. Unclear goals also add to other problems like difficulty in delegating, creating schedules, meeting timelines, etc. But the question is: how can you set the right and clear goals?
Solution: A work scheduling app or a leading resource management software can help you easily establish clear goals for your own self or for your team. The ambiguity of goals can become a huge cause of conflicts, delays of projects, and budget overruns. To be on the same page with everyone else on your team, the first step is to set clear-cut goals for everyone, including yourself. Doing so will positively impact the productivity of your team.
6. Lack of motivation in the team
Another team management challenge that is very common is the lack of motivation in the team. At times your staff may lose interest in work, which leads to less productivity, increased defects, low quality of work, and delay in project completion. Lack of motivation could be from personal reasons such as stress or isolation at work, or maybe because of feeling over-burdened, lack of teamwork, or good leadership.
Solution: Project managers can apply different strategies to encourage motivation in their teams. The first step is to find the root causes of why the team is losing interest in their job or work. To start with, the managers could explain the reason for setting goals and how they can reach there. Regular one-to-one and team connect also provide an opportunity to encourage team members and share their concerns or challenges. Building trust and bonding within the team also help in motivating the employees to achieve their goals.
7. Unrealistic timelines
Many times, missing project schedules can become a habit for some employees or teams. This can turn into a big issue, if not dealt with on time. Having said that, unrealistic timelines are a very common cause of stress for employees and managers. Unrealistic schedules are not at all motivating and people can lose interest in their work because they feel that they anyways won’t be able to achieve it with the given resources and in the crunched time.
Solution: Implementing a work scheduling app that uses Gantt charts can be very helpful for the team to stay on track and meet the timelines. Tools such as eResource Scheduler offer visual dashboards that display the status for each milestone and the Gantt charts show a visual representation of data and progress, which makes it much easier to establish and manage deadlines and execute the project seamlessly.
8. Employee burnout
Overburdening people, especially the top players in your team can put the project at a big risk. Wondering why? Because overburdening can make team members tired, and frustrated, and experience low motivation and morale, which further leads to more errors and finally, increased attrition.
Solutions: Introducing better and more flexible policies that permit some off-time for your team members to recharge their batteries or a better time-tracking and absence management system where they can log in their time off, manage leave balance, and sick leaves helps your team to better manage their time. Resource scheduling software is the best solution that enables you to do all this and more. A tool with a time management and work scheduling app helps employees to log in from anywhere and at any time, check data, share information, and work with transparency. This avoids or reduces burnout and features like resource overload notification in tools like eResource Scheduler helps to provide early warnings if people are over-burdened.
All Set for Better Team Management? Implement The Top-Rated Work Scheduling App – eResource Scheduler
The award-winning, flagship resource management software by Enbraun, eResource Scheduler, brings state-of-the-art features that help you improve your team, project, and resource management. The tool assures high configurability, ease of use, comprehensive and visual dashboards on a single screen, numerous user-defined fields, and a lot more. It not only consolidates all the critical data and information in one central, online repository but also highlights if there are any conflicting priorities or red flags. Project managers can easily distribute the workload in a much more balanced way and keep tracking the resource utilization and profitability on each milestone. Enbraun also assigns an Account Manager to assist you in configuring various fields and forms that your business or projects may require. Have any questions about this work scheduling app? Register soon for a free trial and find out more.