Worker productivity may feel transactional, especially when the main focus is put on the work. But is this the right focus?
Working with a very productive staff is not all about finding ways to work faster and cut time. It can also be about knowing several factors, which play an important role to enhance productivity. These may include company culture, workers’ happiness, and employee engagement.
It is very possible to have engaged and happy workers who are into their jobs but are not as hardworking and productive as you want them to be.
This is why it is important to look for several ways to improve their workers’ productivity. Some of these ways may include the following:
1. Track Working Hours
Perhaps you have heard this before – time is money. However, for many workers, time can be very annoying. This is especially true when tracking time.
Well, tracking work hours can positively impact employee productivity. With the best tracker, you can have an overview of where your staff really stands. It can also help you see workers who work overtime and who complete projects on time.
2. Encourage Workers’ Collaboration
A high level of innovation results in business growth and increased productivity. As a result of this, implementing a collaborative and digital workplace is important for any business that wants to collaborate with its manpower.
Having mobile apps for your business is a perfect way to share the news with timeline features and social feeds. It will allow your business organization to gather valuable workers’ feedback or implement changes. This helps to improve workforce productivity.
3. Improve Employee Onboarding
Once contracts are signed, most employers have the mindset that their workers will always be loyal to all of them. However, the new generation’s talent doesn’t believe in the traditional attitude of working. To positively and effectively integrate them into a company’s culture, it will be best to have a very effective program for onboarding.
Because of an ineffective plan for onboarding, workers lose around 18% of new appointments in the first three months. But the best program for onboarding increases retention by around 50%. The major components of onboarding consist of complete support, wide-ranging training, and feedback.
An important factor that business organizations need to consider is making communication networks easy for workers to know about their workmates.
4. Consider Optimizing Emailing
Some studies show that people spend around 12 hours a week on emailing. Multiply this by the total number of workers in the company, and you will have the exact time you spend being productive.
In order to achieve this, you will need to block time for emails alone. Consider instructing your workers to choose a time window every day when dealing with email and stick to that time. This can be for one hour after lunch or in the evening after leaving work. Other ways to achieve this may include the following:
- Refraining from emailing workers at night
- Keeping emails on point and short
5. Hire a Good Team
Putting workers in roles where they are incapable of carrying out duties efficiently or effectively means you have an uphill battle from the beginning.
You can prevent this by coming up with a program for recruitment, which will target candidates who have the right attributes and skills to fulfill their duties.
Once new hires are recruited, a very effective process for onboarding will ascertain that they run in the company. This entire process needs to make sure projects are matched to individuals with the right knowledge and skills to productively carry out their duties.
6. Delegate Properly
Prioritizing quality is what really makes business organizations successful. But dealing with the heavy lifting yourself rather than delegating will be just a waste of time. Basically, this is invaluable time you would have spent exploring avenues so as to grow your business organization.
To put it into perspective, if you work in the healthcare industry and have recently implemented home care scheduling software into your operations, not only can you see which employee has been scheduled to do which task, but it can also be updated by all members of your organization, meaning that your records will be updated in real-time, which is especially important in industries such as healthcare. At the same time, remember to always delegate duties to qualified workers, and have faith that they will do the tasks as expected. This will give your workers a chance to gain leadership experience and new skills, which can benefit your business organization.
7. Prioritize Effective Communication
Well, communication often means two-way interaction. So you will have to talk and listen, too, not just dictate and delegate.
This, in turn, will lead to high engagement of workers. Communicating properly also means you will eradicate misunderstandings and misconceptions and, at the same time, define all your requirements.
In addition, your workers will feel more relaxed knowing that when they have a problem, they may get clarification by asking some questions. This as well overcomes barriers and helps workers spend more time to understand projects.
8. Create a Good and Family-Like Environment
This does not mean that you treat workers the way you do with your brother or mom. Rather this is all about establishing a good and family-like working environment where workers feel respected and safe.
Ensure your workers know that irrespective of how you really feel about them, you will always have their back. Plus, you will be willing to help them through whenever they have problems and celebrate their successes.
9. Carry out Employee Reviews Regularly
One of the best ways to improve workers’ productivity is to consider holding them liable. You may do this by carrying out performance reviews.
Although they have fallen out of favor, doing employee reviews still has a special place in most business organizations.
If one-on-one sits down are done at a regular basis, preferably twice a year, can present good opportunities to talk about the performance of every work.
This one-on-one sit down can also help to evaluate their weaknesses & strengths and, at the same time, set goals you can use to enhance your workers’ performance. But you may still give feedback every day, especially when it comes to individual projects.
The Bottom Line!
Improving employees’ productivity is not a walk in the park, especially when you just implement one technique. You will have to use several techniques, including reviewing employees, tracking time, creating a family-like environment, and training workers, so as to boost productivity in the business organization.
