How to Improve Team Productivity with Atomic Habits

How can you be more productive as a team? Hi there, I'm Arthur, also known as Agile Arthur. And if you're a little bit like me, then you're always looking for ways to improve your own and your team's productivity. And then you're in the right place, because in this video you will learn how to get more done with less stress for your team - with the help of atomic habits.

And I've also created a Miro template that you can use to start building better habits with your team today. This is one of the many books that I've read about productivity, and which principles I've used the last 10 years to help over 100 teams to improve their team productivity. Now if you're not familiar with the book from James Clear, Atomic Habits are basically these small changes that you make in your life that have a huge compounding effect over time.

This means you don't have to change everything at once and you can start building slowly over time. Just focusing on trying to get one percent better every day. But before we talk about how to apply the principles of Atomic Habits to your team, let's play a little game first to really grasp why it's worth investing in these small changes.

Okay, so imagine you have two options and the first one is this... One cent! But wait it's not an ordinary cent, it's a magical one. The power of this cent is that it doubles in value every day for a month. In other words, when you wake up the next day you miraculously have two cents. On day three you have four cents.

On day four you have eight cents. On day five... Well, you get the point by now. Right? So how much do you think this magic cent is worth after 31 days? After a month. And that's important to think about. Because option number 2 which you can choose is a one-time payment of 1 million euros. So which one would you take?

The magic cent or the 1 million euros? Let's look at how this works out after 31 days. After 5 days the magic cent is only worth 16 cents, and after 10 days it's worth 5 euros and 12 cents. So maybe you want to swap already? Well, that might seem like a good idea, because if we jump to day 20 the magic cent is just worth over 5000 euros.

And you might doubt your decision if you have chosen the magic cent. But then the real magic happens because on day 28 your magic cent is already worth more than 1 million euros! And it still keeps doubling for 3 more days. This means that after 31 days your magic cent is worth more than 10 million euros.

And that's the magic of compounding! So how does this compounding effect apply to your team's productivity i think it's safe to say that most of us want to be more productive you want to get more done in less time so that you feel more ownership over how you spend your day oh yeah by the way wouldn't it be great if your teammates were more productive too but the problem is are habits and not all habits of course but the ones that get in the way of actually being productive and those that put your focus on the wrong things the habits that make you feel that you're too busy doing the thing right that you don't take the time to reflect if you're actually doing the right thing and maybe even how you can do them better and faster you're too focused on the one million euros instead of the magic send and the answer lies in creating atomic habits with your team and to focus on small changes that will result in a huge compound effect over time and the great thing about that is that study shows that team productivity increases by 42 when team members are developing their habits together now before i show you how you can apply the principles of atomic habits to your own team let's give a quick shout out to today's sponsor which is us workshop wednesday our new course run retrospectives like a pro will teach you everything you need to help your team be more productive with team meetings that help you become one percent better every day it includes eight videos that teach you all the concepts of a retrospective team meeting and with the eight mirror templates you can run your first team meeting today and start your compound effect tomorrow you can find a link to the course in the description down below where you can also use the promo code retro 20 to get early access to the course and also to get the course for only 20 euros so how do you build these small habits with your team in atomic habits james clear teaches us how to build better habits and how to break our bad ones so that we can be the best version of ourselves let's talk about five big lessons that you can take from the book and how to apply this with your team to start developing better habits together you can also find these five lessons in this miro board which i will leave a link to in the description as well in this mirror board i've created a workshop where you can find the five lessons and let's go through them one by one the first lesson is small habits lead to big changes and this is the compounding effect that we talked about earlier from the magic send example in the book james clear explains that if you focus on becoming one percent better every day then at the end of the year you have improved yourself 37 times now if you want to do this with your team you can make use of this mirror template to run a team meeting step one is to write down all the habits that you want to build and break and step two is to group similar ideas and then step three is to do a quick voting session and vote on the one habit that you want to work on together that week the focus on that specific habit will allow you and your team to improve one percent every day during that week so to give some examples maybe habits that you want to build is to walk 10 000 steps per day everyone in the team or maybe share your knowledge more one-on-one or work asynchronous first via a knowledge base and maybe habits that you want to break are saying yes to every request or have back-to-back meetings coming in late and unprepared to meetings these are just some examples so allow your team to grab post-its and write the ideas that they have done for themselves and after they have done that they can make use of the dot votes to focus on the habits that you want to change in the next coming week if i went too quick then you can also see the steps over here the instructions for every exercise is next to the exercise itself and then the last step is to plan a weekly team meeting which i will explain in a bit but first lesson two lesson two is to focus on who you want to be and not the outcome if you know who you want to be and what you and your team stand for then the outcomes will follow you can talk about it with your team by asking your team what are the core values the most important principles that they want to share within the team the whole team should agree on your values so you do a photic session again talk about the results and make sure that everyone accepts the final set and these are some examples of team values so inclusivity or maybe creativity quality trust this could be the values that you as a team stand for then every week in the team meeting give everyone on the team a chance to report how they are living to those values because lesson three is that you need to focus on the systems and not the goals the system is how you do it the goal is what outcome you hope it will give an example of a system is how you want to improve productivity as a team having a dedicated moment to talk about how you work together as a team builds in accountability and an opportunity to focus on one small improvement every week so by focusing on the system and how you can improve it you will make it easier for yourself to stick to your new habits and benefit from it even years from now and then it's time for lesson four because once you have decided on the habits and the system that you want to change that week it's time to break down how you can actually build better habits and that's where the four laws of behavior change come to help it's a loop where you start by making your new habit really obvious second then you try to make it attractive the third step is to try to make it easy and then the last step is to make it satisfying to give a reward once you've done the new habit and if you want to break a bad habit you basically do the same but then you inverse it so make it invisible make it unattractive make it difficult and make it unsatisfying to break down a new habit and a system with your team you first start with of course the habit that you chose it in the previous step so copy paste it over here and also do the same for the system that you want to focus on to support that habit and then there are four questions which you can ask yourselves to break down these steps and to make it easier to get started with your new habit the first question is about the queue so how can we make it really obvious to see hear or maybe listen or think about the new habits when it's relevant so in this case if we want to focus on building a system to store our knowledge so that we can work asynchronous first then maybe we should have the knowledge base as our starting page in the browser or maybe create a keyboard shortcut so that we can easily access it so this is the space where everyone in the team can brainstorm ideas on how to make it really obvious to start with a new habit and once you've done that you can do a voting session again and start with those that have the most votes in the next week the second question is about how to make it attractive and something that you enjoy so that you kind of get a craving to make use of that new habit and a new system in this case you could maybe have templates in your knowledge base which help you get a head start with a new task and maybe you can use video and images to make it more attractive you can improve the home page of the knowledge base so that it becomes easier to navigate you could share parts of your knowledge base with stakeholders because that could save you time instead of sending emails every time you want this space and the answer to this question for your team to brainstorm ideas how to make it super attractive to get started with your new habit and the system that supports it and then the third question is about how to make the response or the reaction activity really easy to do in the case of our knowledge base we could maybe install loom to record videos loom is an app that you can access by clicking in your taskbar and then simply pressing record so that makes it really easy or you could maybe share the answers that you give to questions via the knowledge page link and you can also make it really easy to search in your knowledge base maybe with tags or another way but a structure that makes it really easy to find what you need at the right moment and question number four is about the reward how can we make it really satisfying for ourselves so in this case maybe work an hour less each day because you save so much time with the async first approach and also you get to be super flexible with your working hours you don't have to design your life around your work but the other way around and be super flexible on when you want to work and then the fifth lesson that you can take from the book is to have patience for your habits to pay off you need to be persistent long enough remember that the magic sand was only worth more than 1 million dollar after day 28 so be consistent in your habits and after a while you will see major improvements a question that you can ask yourself and your team is how will we help each other and hold each other accountable of keeping to our habits so maybe accountability you hold the team weekly meetings or you track the habits in the mirror board or you will post a screenshot of your progress in slack and ideas to help each other is maybe to pair up and share your screens when practicing your new habits or maybe record short tutorials in the knowledge base which explains on how you can actually apply the habits on a daily basis and then it's also really important to remember that you should celebrate the individual and team wins along the way make these weekly team meetings also a time to recognize team member successes and don't only talk about development opportunities for the coming week celebrating here and there will help team members to get into that habit of recognizing each other's success and that will build trust and team strength over time but most importantly it will increase the happiness of the team team happiness is probably a lot of what team productivity is actually about if your team isn't getting along that well you can maybe deliver some results but it's not going to feel like you're making much progress and now that you know the basic principles of atomic habits and are getting started with improving your team's productivity have a look at this video right here this video will help you learn more about a team meeting approach called retrospective this link right here will help you keep the habit building with your team fun and it will create the much needed accountability to actually stick to your agreements