Despite rising labour costs, employee productivity continues to decline. This trend is particularly concerning as the share of project work as part of total working hours steadily increases.
Additionally, more organisations manage projects internally, which is work they would have previously outsourced. As businesses grapple with managing these projects in-house, project management becomes pivotal to businesses achieving their strategic goals.
Effective management is necessary to ensure projects deliver on their objectives and are completed on time, within budget, and up to the required standard.
With strong project management practices, you can avoid being overwhelmed by the rising complexity of their tasks, leading to inefficiencies, poor productivity, and missed opportunities.
In this article, we explore the following:
- Importance of effective project management
- Key strategies for improving employee productivity through effective project management
- Best productivity apps for effective project management
Importance of effective project management
Project management provides a framework for planning, organising, and controlling resources to achieve the project’s goals within its defined scope and timeframe.
Here are some of the benefits of effective project management:
Provides clarity
Successful project management brings clarity to every project by removing ambiguity. During the early planning phase, defining specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives is a crucial part of the conversation. Effective project management clarifies project scope by specifying what will be delivered and the standards for deliverable acceptance.
It’s much easier for employees to excel at projects that have clear and specific purposes and defined outcomes. From the employees’ perspective, getting project management right helps define and assign clear responsibilities to project team members and helps with outlining tasks, ownership, and accountability through key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics.
Lastly, all these help manage expectations. Stakeholders know what to expect and can monitor and track the project’s progress against project plans, leading to better stakeholder management.
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Proper risk management
Every project is fraught with different forms of risks. These risks include scheduling, human resources, regulatory, safety and security, and technical risks.
While some of these risks are identified during the pre-feasibility and feasibility stages of early project planning, many rear their ugly head as the project progresses. Furthermore, many of these risks are not within the project team's control. Effective project management ensures that the overall project can adapt and that these internal or external risks do not affect the overall completion and implementation of the project.
Improved employee productivity
Many of the risks mentioned above have an outsized effect on employee productivity. For instance, technical risk captures the risk associated with using technology for different facets of the project.
A project manager adopting and implementing unreliable project management tools with repeated downtime and poor user experience will likely lead to poor employee productivity.
The same logic applies to not paying attention to human resource risks. A project team with poor employees will burden the more competent few. Struggling to retain top performers falls into the same boat.
So, a well-rounded project management team that considers all these risks ensures that employee productivity remains at its peak throughout the project’s lifecycle.
Cost savings
A key element of project management is efficient resource allocation. Project managers want to avoid things like scope creep, overtime, revisions, and cost overruns that lead to budget bloat.
Nailing resource allocations means, project managers can make budgets that truly match the project’s scope, timeline, and objectives, ensuring there’s minimal waste and reduced costs.
Respond effectively to changing environment
Effective project management is crucial for responding to changing environments and project specifications. This is aided thanks to the adoption of agile frameworks and risk management, continuous communication with all stakeholders, data-driven decision-making, embracing technology, and flexibility in resource allocation.
Implementing risk management strategies and scenario planning will help project managers identify potential risks early and develop proactive plans to minimise their impact. In addition, maintaining flexibility in project plans allows for adaptations to be made in response to changes in market conditions, regulations, or stakeholder needs.
Effective project managers can also easily reallocate resources based on changing priorities and requirements, ensuring that the right people are working on the right tasks at the right time.
Key strategies for improving employee productivity through effective project management
Below are key approaches that can help improve employee productivity.
Ensure there’s strategic alignment
Without strategic alignment, employees and their teams work at odds, leading to duplication of efforts, underutilised human resources, poor productivity, project delays, and more.
Creating SMART goals and maintaining open and consistent communication are two critical aspects of fostering this alignment. In creating SMART goals you translate project vision into specific objectives for employees to work towards. These objectives dictate resource allocation and ensure employees prioritise tasks that deliver the most impact and contribute to crucial project outcomes.
In addition, project managers must maintain open and honest communication channels to inform team members about project progress, expectations, and changes. Add regular check-ins like town hall meetings to reiterate the project’s objectives and garner feedback.
Keep employees engaged and satisfied
According to McKinsey, unengaged employees and attrition “cost a median-size S&P 500 company between $228 million and $355 million a year in lost productivity.” Whichever way you cut it, these numbers are staggering.
The report describes the leading six drivers of disengagement, namely:
- Poor compensation
- Lack of meaningful work
- Unsafe work environment
- No workplace flexibility
- Absence of career development
- Lack of reliable and supportive people at work
From a project management perspective, the first two are very critical.
So, what can you do?
For starters, offer competitive compensation for all roles. Advocate for competitive salaries and performance-based incentives to ensure employees feel valued.
Secondly, ensure all employees know the potential impact of their work on the overall project goals and strategic objectives.
We’ve repeatedly emphasised the importance of strategic alignment and clear goals. In this area, they play a pivotal role in assigning tasks that align with employees’ skills, interests, and long-term career goals, thus maximising your team’s productivity.
Thorough and exhaustive early planning
Another strategy to improve employee productivity is early planning. Early planning has the significant advantage of facilitating the effective allocation of resources, thus minimising last-minute changes that may disrupt operations and employee downtime.
Some of the critical components you should attend to early on include:
- Gathering the core project team early
- Choosing the appropriate delivery strategy for the project
- Developing realistic estimates for project cost and timeline
- Getting buy-in from major stakeholders
- Managing risks
- Developing bespoke policies and procedures for each project
Failure to adequately attend to any of these keys can affect employee productivity in the future. For example, having stakeholder buy-in reduces friction when making critical decisions or dealing with project challenges. This means you’re more equipped to deal with roadblocks faster, preventing delays.
Adopt the right tools
Using the right project management tools enhances productivity. These tools make it easy to track project progress, streamline processes, collaborate, manage deadlines, and automate workflows and repetitive, manual tasks.
However, we advise caution when adopting any new technology. Choose technology that emphasises flexibility, as every team will manage their projects slightly differently. Being forced into certain ways of working because of your tool choice will hinder productivity rather than increase it.
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Promote and stimulate a culture of collaboration
According to Deloitte, “When employees collaborate, they work 15% faster, 73% do better work; 60% are more innovative; and 56% feel more satisfied.”
Per the Harvard Business Review, these are the key ingredients for promoting a collaborative work environment:
- Executive support in providing environments that nurture collaboration. Have the C-suite be available to interact with employees and have them model collaborative behaviour
- Focused HR practices and acitivities that support a sense of community and are committed to helping teams know how to collaborate
- The right team leaders who are both “task-oriented and relationship-oriented”
- Team formation and structure with clear roles
Best productivity apps for effective project management
Below are some of the top productivity apps that can significantly enhance your project management capabilities:
1. Starhive
Starhive is a domain-agnostic no-code app-building platform that is heavily used for project management. One of Starhive's key value propositions regarding project management is that it allows you to build workflows and processes that are truly reflective of your business and project.
You’re not fitting your needs into existing general-purpose project management apps but creating a tool totally fine-tuned to your processes and procedures.
You can also key project data such as customers, digital assets, standard operating procedures, dependencies, risk assessments, and more, and then create your tasks and sub-tasks and link them to the supporting data.
Leveraging this dependent data and the relationships you established, you can ensure you get full context for every project tasks in one tool. Team members don't have to look up the digital assets they need in another tool which wastes time.
Key features
- Create your own workflows and automations to work your way
- Add any supporting data and link to projects, tasks, and sub-tasks
- Define your own project/task hierarchy
- Custom dashboards and up-to-date reporting
- CSV importer
- Artificial intelligence to get started quicker
- Multiple view options, including gallery, list, board, and timeline views
- Powerful API
- Mobile apps for on-the-go updates
- Media sharing and upload
Pricing
- Free: Available for up to 10 users
- Paid plans: See full details here
2. Asana
Asana is a popular project management app used in large enterprises with multiple departments. A major highlight of Asana is its collaboration features, making it easier for team members to communicate and share details about a project.
Key features
- AI to automate repetitive tasks
- Project views
- Status updates
- Portfolio management
- Dashboards and analytics
- Mobile app
Pricing
- Personal: Free up to 10 teammates
- Starter: $10.99 (billed annually)
- Advanced: $24.99 (billed annually)
- Enterprise: Contact sales
- Enterprise+: Contact sales
3. Trello
While not as sophisticated as the other project management apps on this list, Trello is great for non-complex projects like book publications and marketing campaigns. It’s based on a Kanban board system, offering a visual way to manage tasks.
Key features
- Kanban board-style task management
- Drag-and-drop task movement
- Checklists, due dates, and task attachments
- Labels and filters for easy task organisation
- Power-ups for extended functionality (e.g., calendars, automation)
- Integrations with popular apps
- Mobile apps for managing tasks on the go
Pricing
- Free
- Standard: $5 per user per month (if billed annually)
- Premium: $10 per user per month (if billed annually)
- Enterprise: $17.50 per user per month for up to 250 users (billed annually)
4. Basecamp
Basecamp positions itself as “the project management platform for small teams.” This tool combines many features such as task management, file sharing, message boards, team chat, and document collaboration into one platform.
Key features
- Project scheduling and task assignment
- Real-time collaboration and messaging
- File sharing and storage
- Timesheet for tracking employee productivity
- Schedule view for deadline tracking
- Automated check-ins and reminders
- Integrations with Google Drive, Slack, and more
Pricing
- Basecamp: $15 per user per month (billed annually)
- Basecamp Pro Unlimited: $299 per month for unlimited users
5. Smartsheet
Smartsheet is primarily a work management tool but also works as a productivity app for project management. Think of Smartsheet as spreadsheets (Excel and Google Sheets) on steroids, with powerful project management features.
Key features
- Project planning
- Resource management
- Budget management
- Analytics and reporting
- Workflow automation
- Project templates
- Grid, card, Gantt chart, and calendar views
Pricing
- Pro: $9 per user per month (billed annually)
- Business: $19 per user per month (billed annually)
- Enterprise: Contact sales
Advanced work management: Contact sales
Takeaway: Get ahead with proven project management strategies that enhance employee productivity
Improving employee productivity by adopting an excellent project management process depends on several strategies, including ensuring strategic alignment, adopting the right tools, keeping employees engaged and on the same page, conducting thorough early planning, and promoting a culture of collaboration.
Adopting these strategies allows you to remain agile, streamline workflows, reduce project risks, maintain high performance throughout the project lifecycle, and ultimately enhance employee productivity.
Book a personal demo today to see Starhive in action and experience how to create custom productivity apps tailored to your exact project needs.
