Put up your hand if you’ve ever thought, "I just don’t have enough work to do."
Put up your hand if you’ve ever thought, "I just don’t have enough work to do."
Yeah, I didn’t think so.
As an engineering leader, you typically find that there aren't enough hours in the day. When it comes to boosting the productivity of your team and getting the most out of your day, it's hard to know where to start- so we’ve compiled some tips and tricks that might just turn your working woes into powerfully streamlined teams.
We’re going to encourage you to be a team leader who multiplies the energies and efficiencies of your team, rather than diminishing the work of your engineers.
Of course, even the most efficient teams will eventually need to scale up. If you’re looking to increase your team’s firepower without the hassle or commitment of sourcing and vetting a new full-time engineer, a Gun.io Professional Freelancer may be just what your team needs.
The kind of workspace and atmosphere that you provide is everything. Obviously, you're going to have limitations of building and budget, but the trick is to make what you have as motivating as possible.
How? Consider natural elements, such as plants and natural light. Make sure the space is equipped so that your team has everything on hand they need to get the job done.
And don’t forget to ask what people want. The best office for your team is something only your team can tell you - but by listening to them and providing for their needs, your team is likely to be more motivated and will work more effectively.
Yes, it’s important that everyone knows and understands the lay of the land when you’re working on projects. But nothing is more of a productivity killer than long-winded and unnecessary meetings.
Instead, consider setting up a meeting once a week or so to get a high level update on where your team is in their progress on a project.
For effective leadership, consider these three tips to getting the most out of meetings:
Project management software is a booming business, and for good reason. To be an effective Multiplier leader, you want to make sure you’re doing more with more.
This allows for more autonomy for your team and will limit the scope for micromanaging. They allow you to:
Effective scheduling is a careful art - it’s far more than just setting due dates.
Keep your goals realistic, and consider where it is that your team's energies need most to be invested. You want to make sure that you’re challenging your engineers to work their best, while also ensuring that they’re not feeling stretched too thin.
But make sure to keep your project and expectations super clear from the start, and your goals realistic. Most importantly, get out of their way. Once you have decided what needs to be done by when, allow your team the space and time to actually get the work done.
You can hand your team the tasks and hope that they can fulfill them, or you can appreciate that everybody has their own unique strengths and talents and play to them accordingly.
By feeding into people’s native genius, you can start to place people in the ideal roles where their talents are suited. When you do this, however, be sure that you’re not just trying to shoehorn people into fulfilling a role that you want them to because that’s where you have a gap.
Utilize people at their fullest, connect people with opportunities, and shine a spotlight on them. And if that becomes too much, and you don’t have people for specific roles, then you might consider hiring freelance talent.
This is right up our alley, Gun.io is the top service in the US to find and hire elite freelance engineers. We find engineers that we think will be great all-around team members, and then invite them to join our community. Through these relationships, we gain a diverse and substantial talent funnel, which means that we can bring talent to our clients extremely fast (48 hours, in fact).
We care about your team and what you need, and will only provide top talent that we would want on our own project. We take a 360 view of each candidate through code tests, reference checks and personal phone interviews with our execs before they bill a single hour. It's this commitment to excellence that sets us apart in the freelancing space.
So if you find that your team’s productivity is waning a little because you don’t have the right people for the job, get in touch with us to find out how we can help you ship more in less time.
