7 Tips for Eliminating Workplace Complacency

Admit it, you’ve had to fight complacency in your workplace. Whether it was trying to convince yourself to focus on a project’s completion or watching your team’s eyes glaze over with despondency, we’ve all been there. You want to get things back in the right path, but every time you try to focus your attention span gets shorter and your tolerance for the mundane fades more. So how can you eliminate the ever prevalent complacency that is wreaking havoc on our organization’s productivity?

Here are 7 tips for eliminating complacency in your workplace:

1. Mandate Involvement. Don’t let people be wallflowers in meetings. Set a rule that phones cannot be used during team meetings and watch as people find themselves having to actually be involved.
2. Gamify a piece of your team’s work. Find something mundane or monotonous and turn it into a game. People love competition and fun, how can you make something dull into something exciting?
3. Change up the routine. If you have always had monday morning meetings try changing them to Tuesday or Friday. Breaking routine can be a great way to awaken staff that has been lulled into just going through the motions.
4. Crosstrain you teams. People can easily become complacent when they do the exact same thing every day. Pick a day every month where your team learns something new about someone else’s.
5. Field trip! I know it sounds sophomoric, but engaging your team in a new environment can be refreshing. There is a rejuvenative quality to stepping outside the one’s common environment and it can help your team re-engage.  
6. Set a new, common goal that everyone has a stake in. Putting together a simple task that needs the entire team’s involvement can be a great way to bust out of an organizational rut. Incentivise involvement and make rewards contingent upon the entire team’s participation.
7. Get an outsider. Bringing in an expert to help your team re-engage is a great way to restart your team and build momentum. When facilitated correctly, new ideas and concepts from a authority can catapult your organization out of complacency.

Always look for way to get your team recommitted and re-engaged! If you fail to be vigilant, then complacency will take hold and become almost impossible to unroot. Take the initiative today to help your team overcome the workplace doldrums.