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Visibility in a modern and growth-oriented business is one of the most important pillars of productivity, efficiency, employee satisfaction, and long-term success. It doesn’t matter what the team is doing and which department it belongs to, if you want it to scale safely and effectively so that it pushes your company forward, you have to improve its internal visibility.

In a very traditional sense, visibility is one-way transparency and it used to mean that managers know where their employees are and what they’re doing at all times. Nowadays, though, visibility means that everyone in your organization has a comprehensive overview and that information flows seamlessly both horizontally and vertically.

Good internal visibility can help you achieve many great things, but to improve visibility in your team, you need to use the right tools and implement the right practices. Let’s take a look at the key reasons why your teams need better internal visibility and how to get it.

Reduce and eliminate duplicate effort

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Duplicate effort doesn’t bring anything to the team or the company, but it takes away brain power, valuable time and money, and other resources that could have been used to achieve complementary objectives. If you took the time to analyze all the work being done in a specific team, you would be surprised at just how much of that work is actually duplicate effort – like two people working on the same thing even though they should have been working on different tasks.

This is a surefire way to waste people’s potential and talent, and it will hold your team back from becoming more efficient and productive. That’s why you or the team leader needs to communicate with the individuals in the team, set clear expectations for everyone, and monitor their work through an employee management tool or a centralized collaborative platform.

Reduce meetings but improve results

Nobody likes being stuck in a meeting that could easily have been an email, but worst yet, it’s important to note that having too many meetings can have an adverse effect on the team as a whole. By meeting with your team members over every little thing, you’re distracting them from their work, you’re distracting yourself from the mission-critical processes, but you’re not getting the visibility you need to keep the projects moving along.

The key here is not to have more meetings or to get people to report in more frequently, but to elevate internal visibility for everyone involved. By implementing a cloud-based project management tool, for example, everyone will be able to track all projects and tasks in real time, exchange crucial information, and automate the reporting process so that everyone is kept in the loop at all times.

Improve visibility between leaders and employees

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Internal visibility is not just about keeping everyone in the loop or improving collaboration between employees, as you also need to improve visibility to improve communication between leaders and their teams. The key is to connect with employees on the channels they prefer, using an employee engagement tool that gives your leaders an overview of your employee collective, provides various communication options, and facilitates employee feedback.

Feedback in particular is an important element of employee happiness and productivity, because it allows you and your leaders to make better strategic decisions based on relevant, actionable data. Be sure to use your employee engagement tool to encourage and empower your employees to provide regular end-of-shift feedback that will allow you to set the entire team up for growth and success.

Keep everyone on the same page

Too often will you see that people are working on the same projects but that they have a slightly different view of the problem and the way to reach the finish line. Remember, people might be working together, but they might not be collaborating with a unified vision.

Everyone in your team needs to be on the same page at all times, in order to keep all projects moving along in daily, incremental steps. By improving visibility and making all data visible to all your team members, you will reduce unnecessary distractions and the need to send countless messages and emails, effectively helping people to focus on the task at hand.

Seamless coordination between remote teams

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Now that remote work has become the norm, leaders are faced with a difficult task of managing and aligning their new remote workers with the rest of the employee collective. It’s tough to manage remote teams through emails and video calls alone, and instead, you need to think of improving visibility for everyone involved.

Giving everyone access to a collaborative online environment will allow newcomers to learn the ropes quickly, and will help push the team forward. It will also give you a bird’s eye view of your entire remote structure so that you always know how to better guide, direct, and support your new and veteran team members.

Wrapping up

As you can see, internal visibility is one of the key elements of success, whether you’re managing centralized or decentralized teams. With these tips in mind, you can improve visibility in your entire organization to enable your teams to grow and scale in a safe and effective way in 2021 and beyond.