With COVID-19 still looming in our collective minds, the teamwork landscape has seen drastic changes as a result of social distancing and remote work collaboration. This has prompted managers to implement new ways of keeping track of staff performance through dedicated HR software solutions in order to maximize their engagement. According to Forbes, employees with adequate collaboration goals and conditions have a 64% higher engagement and success rate than their individual counterparts.
Given the aforementioned COVID-19 situation, studies have shown a 176% increase in collaboration apps use in 2020, whose users stated an 85% increase in productivity. While remote work applications can indeed help manage your team more precisely, solid team collaboration KPIs will further enhance their resolve in the new landscape. That being said, let’s discuss which statistics you should consider tracking, the benefits of doing so, as well as how to create your own KPIs.
The Benefits of Implementing Team Collaboration Statistics
Let’s start off with the “why” in order to have a better grasp of the KPI tracking concept. Managing any number of employees is difficult in itself due to their various skillsets, personal goals, and professional aspirations. However, merging business and technology in the form of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) has made the process simpler.
Professional team collaboration platforms such as Asana, Trello, and Jira have made it possible for project managers to keep track of their teams’ statistics easily. Creating KPIs and subsequently tracking them can lead to several noteworthy benefits for your production pipeline going forward:
- Drastic improvement of staff productivity, work engagement, and collaboration
- Clearer organization of internal production files and documents
- Streamlined goal-tracking, reporting, and analysis
- Quick and easy communication with anyone working on the project
- Remote work opportunities, both from home and internationally
- More informed decision-making for work delegation and project planning
- Increased quality of the final product and higher client satisfaction
Tracking Quantitative VS Qualitative Statistics
Tracking your team’s statistics is all about carefully defining what your KPIs really are. Given that goals can be defined in different ways, there are two commonly used ways to create KPIs – quantitative and qualitative.
While the former is focused on the quantity of produced work, like with email writing, the latter is more liberal. For example, “efficient teamwork” is not a quantitative goal since you can contribute to it each day and not “fulfill it.” You can use SMART methodology to define your quantitative goals, while the qualitative ones can be defined with a simple mind map or brainstorm exercise.
Both types of statistics play a crucial role in ensuring that your team is as focused and productive on the project at hand as possible. Your team members can track and tick off quantitative KPIs independently while you, as their supervisor or manager, can keep track of qualitative goals, respectively. This will ensure that both types of goals are met as objectively as possible, which will lead to better work conditions for everyone involved.
Team Collaboration Statistics to Keep Track Of
- Task Progress Overview
You should always keep track of how well your project is progressing in order to meet the set deadline. This KPI can take the form of a percentage bar and get filled up through team management and meetings. Simply start at 0 and keep filling the progress bar until you reach 100, which is when your project should be finished and presentable.
As we’ve mentioned before, only you, as the project lead, should track this KPI based on the information you gather from the team. Everyone on your team should actively contribute to the percentage, and the statistic should be available for the entire team to see throughout production.
- Team Evaluations
Team meetings are an essential element of making sure that the project you are working on is successful. Thus, the act of meeting with the entire team to discuss the workflow should be tracked as a KPI.
To make the meetings more efficient, you can use writing platforms such as Evernote, Get Good Grade, or Google Docs to write and format notes. You should also prepare an agenda for your team meetings to keep the focus strictly on the project at hand. This will further increase the efficiency of your team evaluations and make it easier for you to analyze the team’s performance down the line.
- Workload Delegation Efficacy
Even if you are tasked with managing a team of five programmers, those programmers will have drastically different skills and aspirations from one another. This makes smart and efficient work delegation a priority and a worthy statistic to keep track of team-wise.
Workload delegation should always be done during a team meeting where everyone can object, pitch in and comment on your decisions. Never delegate work independently and of your own volition since it can lead to unnecessary backtracking and production delays. Workload delegation is a qualitative statistic, and it is very much team collaboration oriented – treat it as such and work toward it as a team.
- Work Hours per Team Member
Tracking how much time each of your team members spent working on a project may seem counterintuitive at first. However, given that most team collaboration management revolves around remote work, some of your members may be inclined to slack off.
This can cause issues for the entire team and lead to unnecessary crunch time, delays, or even mistakes in the final product. Discuss this statistic with your team and assure them that no one is exempt from it, yourself included. Everyone involved in the project should pitch in equally to help produce the best product possible for everyone’s sake.
- Team Member Coaching
As a project lead, your duties extend further than work delegation and micromanagement. Coaching and mentoring play a large part in how effective your team will be at managing the work you delegated. Make time to talk to each member of your team at least once a month to simply chat about how work is going.
It goes without saying that a certain degree of “doctor-patient confidentiality” should apply since coaching is all about their individual personal and professional development. You can help each member of your team create personal goals which coincide with the project to make them more motivated and inclined to collaborate. This can dramatically improve your group’s teamwork and ensure that everyone on the roster is content with their position on the team.
- Final Output Quality
Finally, the whole team should collaborate to gauge the quality of the final product before it’s shipped to the client. This statistic is different from the progress KPI since it involves a review of the entire production pipeline and its events.
You should discuss what went right and wrong, what can be improved for the future, and what everyone learned from the project. Each member of your team can then grade the quality of the group project 0-10, and you can calculate the cumulative score from gathered data.
Teamwork in the Ever-Changing Digital Landscape (Conclusion)
The statistics we’ve discussed serve to make your production pipeline more engaging and to give each member of your team agency and ownership over work. Team collaboration statistics are intended for internal tracking and production improvement, so don’t be too hard on your team by micromanaging them through KPIs. Organize a team meeting and discuss what types of goals you can track collaboratively in order to make your workflow more efficient and fun overall. Don’t let tracking dictate how you do your work – instead, adapt the KPIs to your workflow and make them work in your favor.