The success of your business depends on your team. That’s why it’s so important to keep the team motivated and focus on constantly finding new ways to improve their performance.

Here are 5 simple steps that will improve your teamwork and help your organisation run like a well-oiled machine.

1. Set goals and rules

In order to be successful, the team needs to have a clear understanding of project goals and requirements as only then can be held responsible and accountable for moving the project forward and accomplishing (or not accomplishing) the goals.

Setting goals for your sales team is usually much easier than setting goals for the support department. With HostBill, you can use sales reports from foregoing months available in admin panel to evaluate your sales performance and use income forecast feature to see the sales predictions. That information will help you to set smart goals, as only realistic sales goals will motivate the team.

However, this doesn’t mean that your business goals should be all about hitting numbers and reaching specific revenue. Productivity and activity goals are equally important and benefit your revenue in the long run. Discuss with your support department how much time is needed to solve the specific problem and respond to the client, how many tickets can be solved during the day etc. Based on that information set timelines and deadlines for customer support.

To improve the chances of reaching the goals – make them visible for the team. You can use simple To-do widget to display a list of goals to accomplish.

2. Delegate tasks

Effective task delegation not only saves your time and increases productivity but also gives your team members the ability to learn new skills and gain knowledge and as a result makes the whole team stronger. Task delegation is an essential leadership skill and requires a good understanding of the team’s strengths and weaknesses as tasks should be assigned based on staff’ skills and experience.

HostBill makes task delegation easier by giving you the ability to create various support departments. Each support department can have different staff members assigned to it, and focus on solving issues revolving around specific subject. You clients can be divided into groups (based on any factor you want: industry, country, size etc) with different priority levels and assign them to different support departments.

To better organize your work you can also use Calendar widget to create tasks and assign them to specific client, service, or hosting account and a staff member responsible for completing the task. To-do list plugin, that also can be pinned to your HostBill dashboard, can also come in handy.

3. Enhance communication

Effective communication is crucial to the team’s success. The ability to work together and communicate the needs, requirements and ideas not only increases efficiency but simply creates comfortable and friendly environment at work.

Missed project deadlines and slow progress toward problem solving can indicate communication issues. A message that is delivered poorly can cause taking incorrect actions. To help your team communicate more efficiently you can use HostBill’s internal notes system. In HostBill admin panel you can attach internal notes to literally any part of the project – a specific ticket, account, domain details, invoice, order etc. The notes can be used to explain tasks, describe the progress on task completion or to share ideas.

You also have the ability to create internal tickets assigned to the customer but visible only for staff members. This way your staff can start working on a specific issue related with that customer and inform the client only once the problem is solved. Collective work and success lessens the distance between the team’s workers and unites the team giving them the feeling that everyone’s effort is aimed at benefit of all.

4. Track and measure the performance

To improve your team performance you must be able to measure it. Of course there are different indicators to check how your team members are doing, depending for example on a department.

The statistic and reports tab in your HostBill admin panel will give you deep insight into your sales and support performance. You can browse your income by country, service, payment gateway or overall and monitor sign-ups or ticket replies in given time period.

Apart from this feature, you can use two other modules to measure your staff performance: End of Shift Reports and Support Time & Performance Tracker. The first one enables employee to write report on closed/resolved tickets during their shift to inform the superior about their performance during the shift. The tool can be used in different departments: customer support, sales, developers and more. Support Time and Performance Tracker module lets you measure and analyze your support staff performance as well as find and fix bottlenecks in your daily support operations. With this module you can organize your support tasks by creating different job types the tickets can be assigned to. Every ticket have its own custom timetable and every second your staff spends working on support thread is logged. Thanks to this you can easily check which staff member resolves issues fastest and who is spending most time to resolve common problems.

5. Reward

Company’s reward system should recognise employees for two types of activities: performance and behaviour. Although rewarding the behaviour (dedication to the project, working long hours, improving customer relationship etc) can be a bit tricky as it’s hard to measure unlike the performance, both should be considered.

There’s plenty of ways to reward your employees for their results: from recognition, through non-monetary to cash, with the latter usually being the most desirable and most motivating for the employees. With HostBill’s Staff Sales module you can easily reward you sales workers. You can choose to reward a monthly bonus to the highest earner or add small commission to each sale and package upgrade. The module collects sale data and adds commission automatically based on default commission rate per sales team member. Some companies prefer to use both: positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement to motivate employees. In that case you can for example decrease commission on account cancellation.