4 Barriers that Hinder Team Productivity – and How to Overcome Them

Achieving company-wide synchronization so that all teams work towards the same goals is not a trivial task. In fact, it is more difficult today than ever before. The number of applications, the volume of information, and the complexity we encounter daily are constantly increasing and creating barriers to team productivity.

Dispersed Collaboration

Work takes a different shape in the post-pandemic world. Some companies have returned to traditional models of mandatory office presence. Still, in many others, hybrid models have taken hold, with teams continuing to work remotely and in different places or even at different times. Whichever way a specific organization operates - work has changed. It no longer takes place in one place, and this creates unique challenges for leaders and teams alike in managing priorities across locations, time zones, and cultures.

Many dispersed teams face these problems:

  • Lack of visibility: Important contexts are not easy to find, and teams do not easily know who is working on what and where the right information is located.
  • Hurdles with communication and coordination: Coordinating with colleagues in three different time zones, getting a response from a team member who is not online, and making sense of comments that lack context - these and other hurdles can affect collaboration.
  • Needed improvements regarding processes: In many cases, there are duplicated processes; there is a lack of standardization regarding collective knowledge or shared documentation. As such, goals and decisions are based on incoherent information.

To overcome these hurdles, teams are well advised to strengthen asynchronous communication and use tools to provide contextual feedback and collaborate centrally.

4 barriers that hinder team productivity - and how to overcome them - woman jumping hurdles

Tool proliferation

Countless technologies and applications on the market have what it takes to boost team productivity. Employees and teams adapt these tools and combine them into toolsets that help them do their work faster and better. But more applications don't necessarily mean the best results.

There is a (fluid) threshold in which a number of apps actually slow down rather than boost employee and teamwork. Whenever a user switches from one application to the next in the course of completing his or her tasks, he or she experiences a change of context. And such context changes are one of the main causes of productivity losses in the modern working world.

In a study by Quatalog, 45 percent of employees surveyed said that context switching affected their productivity. They were aware that they spent too much of the workday jumping back and forth between online applications.

The unchecked proliferation of apps can lead to uncontrolled cost increases, tool redundancies, more complexity, and a higher administrative burden. To control costs and balance productivity, organizations should approach tool decisions with intention and care, optimizing the software landscape to meet the needs of their teams.

Team alignment

Larger companies are typically organized into functional units. Each team has a specific purpose or function - often, the different teams use their processes and tools to best accomplish their tasks.

For the individual team, this is often a workable and productive approach, but disastrous consequences can result if ripple effects form: Teams then operate in silos and have no or only rudimentary insights into the work of the other teams. Accordingly, access to knowledge and data is complicated, resulting in misjudgments, inefficiencies, and duplicative work across the organization.

4 barriers that hinder team productivity - and how to overcome them - 3 large industrial silos

The battle against chaos in organizing and executing work across different departments, teams, and tools results in efforts to standardize a particular toolset in many organizations. Providing a single toolset as an all-in-one solution may be tempting from a management perspective, but it creates new problems.

For example, teams are forced to work with inappropriate (because they are inflexible) workflows or do without features they need and want. This stifles creativity - and ultimately, the teams find their own ways to circumvent the standardized toolset. This then leads to new problems and new inefficiencies.

Teams need a modern approach. Work and progress must be made transparent in real-time. Digital collaboration needs to be centralized but at the same time have flexible tools with customizable workflows. Information should be visible and available at all times across departments. It should be possible to share knowledge and important info quickly and easily. More shared knowledge and less friction between teams means fewer silos. And that increases overall productivity.

Employee engagement

Engaged, committed, empowered employees who identify with the company are worth gold to an organization. However, in every company, there are also employees who don’t feel an attachment, are dissatisfied, and have little loyalty to their workplace. This is often because their needs are not taken into account, or not enough, at work. The solution sounds simple: organizations just need to find more people in the first category to boost productivity, right?

It is not that simple. High or low employee engagement is not a characteristic or trait of an individual. Rather, engagement is based on experience of working and interacting with companies, managers, and team members. Therefore, corporate culture plays an important role in building and sustaining employee engagement.

Years of investment in an open, collaborative, appreciative organization is a cheque made out to the future. And that investment must include software tools that meet the demands of modern teamwork. But the effort is worth it: engagement is directly linked to productivity. Companies with higher employee engagement achieve 23 percent higher profits.

4 barriers that hinder team productivity - and how to overcome them - laptop showing a graph going upwards with the word profit underneath

A package to maximize productivity

To remove barriers and create better conditions for productive work, companies need solutions that allow employees to work the way they want to and the way that makes the most sense given their tasks and projects. At the same time, these tools should strengthen cross-functional alignment, visibility, and flexibility.

For this reason, Atlassian has put together a suite called Atlassian Together, which sets out to give organizations the best productivity solutions in one bundle:

  • Trello is used in distributed teams to manage and organize tasks, meetings, brainstorming sessions, etc.
  • Jira Work Management is aimed at larger teams with structured workflows that need to systematically manage their projects, tasks and processes.
  • Atlas is the new teamwork portal to promote alignment by making teams, work and goals visible and communicable across the organization.
  • Confluence is the wiki and social collaboration system for cross-team collaboration on content and central mapping of corporate knowledge.
  • Access is the security gateway to Atlassian's cloud solutions and is used as a user and access management tool.

With Atlassian Together, organizations have a complete toolset that provides teams with mature and proven solutions for collaboration while supporting alignment. Have questions about the products bundled in Atlassian Together? Would you like to know more about the Atlassian Cloud and its potential for the teams in your organization? Or does your organization need support moving from legacy server solutions to the Cloud? Our Atlassian experts will be happy to talk to you: get in touch!

Further Reading

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