6 Best Productivity Workshop Ideas to Boost Your Team’s Performance

With most UK employees productive for only 3 of 8 hours in a working day, there’s no question that boosting your team’s productivity can help you leverage serious results. Workshops can help bring your team together and foster growth, creating a culture that allows everyone to do their best work and get into flow.

Whether you’re ready to banish distraction, maximise active attention or make meetings that work, here are our six best productivity workshop ideas for your team.

1. Understanding flow

2. Managing energy

3. Tackling distraction

4. Adopting a pull system

5. Smart meetings

1. Understanding Flow

Unlocking more flow in our working hours is the secret to becoming five times more productive than usual. Helping your employees understand flow and how they can reach it more often won’t just boost team productivity; it’ll also help your people find more meaning in their work.

Flow is a state of intense focus and engagement in an activity where time seems to disappear and you find yourself accomplishing whatever you’re doing in a way that feels effortless and enjoyable. It’s at the sweet spot of where an action is challenging enough to take our full attention, but not too difficult.

This productivity workshop idea begins with defining flow, for example by watching this video. You can then ask your team to share instances in their own lives where they’ve found flow, whether in sports, cooking or hobbies. Each member can also talk about how flow feels for them and, as a team, you can discuss ways to experience it more often at work (some of which we’ll cover below).

2. Managing Energy

If you’ve ever held a 2pm meeting, commonly known as ‘the graveyard shift’, you’ll know we’re not equally productive at all times of day. This productivity workshop focuses on empowering your team members to identify and embrace the times when they work best.

You can begin by asking participants to write down all their key tasks on post-its. At this point, you can divide a whiteboard into three columns:

• Proactive attention: This is when you are at your best, ready to tackle your hardest tasks or plan your most meaningful work.

• Active attention:  You’re still alert, but not as much, and can work through simpler tasks that don’t require as much headspace.

• Inactive attention: Think early afternoon or the end of the day. This is the time for the straightforward jobs that don’t need much thinking.

This idea of understanding your attention level comes from Graham Allcott’s brilliant book, How to Be a Productivity Ninja. The next step for your team is to take your post-it tasks and stick them into the columns where they think each belongs. This will prompt a discussion around what tasks need your team’s best thinking time.

It also gives each team member a chance to share when they have their proactive attention so you can understand each other better and also know when a colleague is likely to be in flow, helping you minimise distractions.

If you’re looking to streamline your processes as a team and create a culture of responsibility in your organisation, our team development coach Heather Anstey-Myers has spent years helping teams overcome challenges and create lasting positive change. If you’d like to work with Heather, take a look at our team development workshops and book a free consultation here.

3. Tackling Distraction

From smartphones to desk chat, the average employee is interrupted around 56 times a day at work. This, of course, comes at a steep cost to productivity. 

In preparation for this productivity workshop, you can ask your team to track their distractions over a few days and submit them to you via a survey. This means you can open your workshop with real data on distractions in your team, allowing you to identify patterns together.

Going around the room, each team member can share their experiences of distraction and what would help them maintain better focus. Following this, distribute post-its and ask all participants to write down as many ideas as they can think of to minimise distractions in a 3-minute window. They can then stick their post-its on the board.

The final step is for you to read out all the ideas, removing duplicates. Each team member then has the opportunity to mark a dot on each of their favourite ideas, a process called ‘dotmocracy’. At the end, you’ll be able to clearly identify the measures for minimising distraction your team wants to take forward and, together, you can come up with actions to take these forward.

4. Adopting a Pull System

In the UK, it should concern all of us that 91% of adults have experienced high pressure or stress in the last year. Chronic stress is a huge contributor to burnout, which will impact your team’s productivity and, more importantly, their wellbeing.

The pull model is an idea from Cal Newport’s book Slow Productivity that’s intended to beat the overwhelm that comes with overflowing to-do lists. Essentially, instead of pushing all available tasks onto team members, each person only pulls a new task as and when they have the capacity to handle it, with ideally no more than three tasks at any one time.

In this workshop, divide a board into squares - one for each of the production stages for your team. For example, this might be ‘Design’, ‘Build’, ‘Launch’, ‘Test’ at its most basic. You then write each of the projects your team is currently handling on post-it notes, placing them in the box for whatever stage they’re complete.

The premise of the pull system is that you can’t move a project to the next stage of development until you have team members with the resources ready to handle it. When you do move the post-it forward, assign a person’s name to it. This method also allows you to spot projects that aren’t moving along, so you can either assign more people or make the decision to drop them.

5. Smart Meetings

We couldn’t write a guide to our best productivity workshop ideas without covering the elephant in the room: meetings. According to a survey by Atlassian, 78% of people say they attend so many meetings that they struggle to get their work done.

If this sounds like your organisation, the good news is that you can probably easily achieve team buy-in and save lots of time, allowing for more flow, less distraction and greater productivity.

Start this session with a group brainstorm, writing answers on the board. You can ask:

• What makes a meeting pointless?

• What makes it powerful?

From there, it’s a powerful tool to stick up printed-out slides showing frameworks for inspiration. For example, you could share the Amazon Two-Pizza Rule (keep meetings small enough to feed with two pizzas), ROTI (Return on Time Invested), and the three-question agenda (Why are we meeting? What do we need to decide? Who really needs to be here?)

Invite your team to circulate around the room and stick post-it notes sharing their impressions and ideas around the examples. This can help you see what resonates and, as a team, set ground rules around meetings, both for yourselves and how you’ll approach them with other stakeholders in the business.

The key here is to follow up on progress and empower team members to hold each other accountable, only organising meetings as and when they are genuinely worthwhile.

Workshops to Boost Team Productivity

Improving your team’s productivity has many facets, from culture and collaboration to tools and streamlined workflows. We hope our six best productivity workshop ideas have inspired you to consider new ways to help your team realise their potential.

For more insights on team development and leadership coaching, read our blog articles, including the benefits of executive coaching.

When you’re ready to go further, our team development coach Heather Anstey-Myers can help take your team’s productivity to the next level. Expert in fostering growth within large teams, Heather has condensed over thirty years of experience into actionable workshops that can help you improve performance, whatever challenge you’re facing.

Find out more about our team development workshops and one-to-one coaching, or book a free consultation with Heather here.