Productivity can be treated as a buzzword, or it can be infused into everything your company does.

Break Up and Delegate in One-Day Chunks

An old riddle goes, “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer: “One bite at a time.” Breaking up your projects into manageable pieces for each member of your team means that everyone can come to meetings each morning with something measurable to report. This means no one will get overwhelmed by taking on too much at once, and everyone can work together on different aspects of the project.

Hold Small Standing Meetings

Meetings can be a great hindrance to productivity, so refining them is needed. Standing meetings help people get to their points more quickly, and only inviting crucial individuals for a small number of clearly-defined goals helps keep the meeting quick and productive. When it comes to meetings, less is definitely more.

Group Redesign

Every group has personal preferences on what lets them be the most productive. Allowing your team to redesign their group areas and individual work spaces can increase their productivity and morale. While you do have the final say on whether extreme ideas pass or not, allowing work cocoons, communal spaces and stand-up desks can let your team feel their most comfortable and capable.

Speak Where They Listen

Part of communicating well is identifying how your listener best understands and responds. You can take this into sharing information with your team via email, via conference call, via social media, via text message, or any preferred way they like to communicate. This can involve more work for you or your assistant in the short term, but the long-term results can be powerful.

Free-Wheeling Time

In addition to regular PTO and vacation time, you can offer your employees a day a week as a “work on whatever you want” day. This lets them be creative and use company resources to create something interesting. This is also good for helping your employees bring fresh ideas into existing projects, since they’ll already be pumped going into or coming out of their most creative day.