Team motivation keeps pushing the team in the right direction. Visualization strategies and techniques can help elevate team productivity and boost team spirit. Make the most of the kudos cards, boards, calendars, chat statuses, notices, and even jars - and learn how to use them to boost your team’s confidence and productivity.
Visualization for Motivation
Motivation plays a huge role in team productivity. A motivated team will collaborate better and achieve better results. Employers and managers should aim to boost intrinsic motivation in each team member. Intrinsic motivation sparks the wish to be productive and achieve new daily goals.
Teams should work together to cultivate and boost intrinsic motivation in each individual to achieve success as a team. For the team to give their best, it’s essential to learn how to motivate them and what motivates them the most.
Visualization paves the way for motivation because visuals are easy to use and remember. Improving teams’ motivation with visual cues has the amazing benefit of being fun and easy to use.
Kudos cards for acknowledging achievements
Kudos cards are cards that the team can use to give feedback and praise a job well done. They can be placed on a board where everyone will see them or shared with the rest of the team using a board that everyone can access online.
Teams can celebrate success and give recognition using kudos cards. Put up a board where the team will place kudos cards. Equip your team with everything they need to write a card and put it near the board, ensuring easy access to the kudos board. Encourage the team to use the board to share their experiences and give recognition, but as a project manager, you should always lead by example! Place a card each time you want to praise an achievement a team member made and share it with others. Kudos cards are a great way to celebrate a successfully finished task or thank a member who provided guidance, training, help, or assistance to others.
Kudos cards help the team share positive feedback and experiences and build a stronger bond. Looking at the kudos board, your team will think back to their special achievements and instances when they provided help to others or were assisted and backed up by the team. It helps the team realize that no matter how complex a problem might seem, it’s always solvable.
Giving feedback and praise for a successfully completed job will motivate the team to give their best. Co-workers who, among themselves, recognize the achievements of other team members build long-lasting collaboration ties and team spirit.
Today’s trick
When a team member comes to a breakthrough, they should share it with the entire team. It might help someone in the present or future and save time for the entire team when working on a task. Provide a place where the team can share their tips and tricks. The best way to share such tips is to create a section to put today’s trick on a board.
It’s also helpful to keep all the cards with the best tips in a digital document or record them in an ActiveCollab discussion, for example, to use in the future. Saving the best tips and tricks is also handy when onboarding new team members.
Project Management Software for Sharing Positive Feedback and Recognition
Communication is key to collaboration and motivation. ActiveCollab lets you communicate with your team using built-in chat and comments on tasks and discussions. Learning the art of positive communication in the workplace makes all the difference in building collaboration and trust.
Clear and frequent communication motivates the team and makes them feel valued. In ActiveCollab, you can share positive feedback by leaving a reaction to a message in chat or comment, which allows teams to celebrate the success of others or provide their support.
Encourage positive communication through ActiveCollab and give recognition to others for putting their best foot forward. Working in a team on a project means you’re all in it together for the win!
Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing
Boards are used in offices to visualize work and share information. It’s important to share all the important info with your team because it keeps them in the loop, and in such a way, the team also continuously learns about the production process. Visualizing work using ActiveCollab software and creating boards in the software is also possible. Important news and updates can be shared through ActiveCollab’s chat, an integral software part.
Team Vision Board
Motivating a team can be as simple as creating a team vision board. Tell the team to put everything they want to achieve on the vision board. The team shares their ideas and sets new goals on the vision board. Having a collection of ideas and goals in one place will also make it easy to plan the next step in the project and have more productive planning meetings when you can discuss how these goals and ideas can be realized together.
The team vision board should be placed where everyone can see and contribute to it, but the key is to figure out the steps needed for these ideas to come to fruition.
Knowledge-sharing Board
An efficient and fun way to share knowledge is to use a board. Create a place for the team to share tips or advice on the board. The tip of the day can also be shared daily for easier knowledge sharing and communication with other team members. Consistency in sharing information and knowledge creates transparency and easily builds the team’s experience. Learning all about how an organization, team, or company works is a lot of work, and doing it consistently will help the team stay on top of all the changes and gradually soak up the knowledge. Sharing graphs, charts, and other data is also visually appealing, easy to understand, and can help the team easily grasp otherwise complex info.
Improving Focus with Visual Cues
Visual cues used for sharing information about whether the team is busy working on something or open for collaboration and discussion are the best ways to improve your team’s focus. Interrupting them can have negative effects once someone is intensely focused on figuring out a task.
Teams use visualization techniques to let others know when they would not like to be interrupted. They use do not disturb signs on office doors, color-coded indicators, or even magnets to indicate different focus levels they’re currently in and share this information more easily with their team.
Teams that work from the office use visual cues to let other team members know when they are working on an urgent task or in the middle of a meeting. Teams can also use traffic lights, magnets, lava lamps, or a do-not-disturb notice on the door.
Team Presence Board
Working together means collaborating extensively among team members and across teams. To collaborate better, you must find an efficient way to fit it into your busy schedules and find an empty slot. This is easier said than done!
However, there is an easy way always to know who’s available and who’s currently working on something very important and would rather not be interrupted. Introducing the team presence board!
A board that shows each person’s schedule is easy to create and update and will provide a solid basis for the team's collaboration. Every member can fill in their own schedule or check the schedule of others and effortlessly plan new meetings, collaborate, or get and provide help when working together on a task.
When a team uses project management software, such as ActiveCollab, it is even easier for everyone to stay tuned to other team members’ schedules. You can easily check someone's availability status in chat or when mentioning someone in a comment and get all the necessary information. ActiveCollab makes it possible to plan your work and your schedule efficiently.
Project Monitoring and Status Tracking
Working on a project is much easier when everyone knows all the important stages the project goes through. Each project segment progresses at its own pace, as does the project itself. Monitoring the project’s progress can be done using visualization techniques, and one such method is the traffic light system. It’s a simple yet effective visual way to show the team if the project is experiencing a sudden roadblock, paused, or the processes are running smoothly.
Place a traffic light in your office. Use a red light to indicate if the team is working on removing an obstacle, a yellow light to indicate if the project's progress is halted, or a green light to indicate if all the processes and production run smoothly.
Another way to track the progress of the project is to monitor the progress of each task. You can easily achieve that in ActiveCollab by assigning a label to each task. Using color-coded labels to indicate the stage of each task makes it easy for the team and the project manager to check the task status at a glance.
Teams can also use fun visual ways to show the project's progress while in the office. You can be creative and use lights or lava lamps that will show the team if the processes are running smoothly or if they are experiencing a sudden issue at the moment that is being worked on. That way, when the team members arrive in the office, they will know just by looking at the lamp that, for example, the entire team is busy because they are working on urgently removing a bug.
Celebrating Team Success
Teams that work together must recognize and celebrate team achievements because those moments build team spirit and pave the way for future improvements. There are numerous ways to use visualizations to help your team celebrate its success, from making a special achievement poster to organizing an event to bring the team together.
Teams can also celebrate their success when crossing an important threshold. Create a reward system, such as placing a jar where team members place marbles or other items for each resolved issue or achievement. Once the jar is full, the team can pick their reward and have a night out together or celebrate their achievements by ordering pizza.
You can also use ActiveCollab to track team achievements that the team will celebrate. Create a task or a discussion where the team can post their achievements in the comments, and consistently reward the team to instill team spirit.
