In the business environment, ensuring and enhancing employee productivity is a critical component that should not be ignored. If you are operating a business, then you want to slice away things that make the work seem routine and mundane, where you can. It is an inevitable reality when it comes to business; you will eventually run into factors that weaken or even extinguish employee motivation, dampening the productivity.
You will want to get rid of the productivity killing factors as soon as possible. You can start by identifying the key factors and putting in efforts to prevent them from aggravating. However, a proactive stance is your best route to increasing employee productivity by implementing the strategies below.
Use Technology
Technology enables employees to work easier and more regularly even remotely as long as they have access to tools they require to work and manage their time effectively. One such technology is video conferencing that allows individuals to connect seamlessly to offices and locations instantly. This offers your business plenty of benefits, and one of them is increased productivity due to fewer travel hours.
Internal policies like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) will also give your employees the freedom to work with equipment and tools they are most comfortable with. This translates to making their lives easier, inevitably increasing individual productivity.
Loosen the Reigns: Be Flexible
Loosen up your reigns and learn to trust the people working for you. However, this does not mean that you have to let go entirely, it just means that you can keep track of tasks by setting deadlines and goals to monitor their individual output. This approach empowers your employees, giving an extra reason why they should take on greater responsibility over what they do.
An open approach also results in employees becoming more accountable when it comes to missed deadlines and underperformance. Increased flexibility also builds the level of trust between employees and their managers – meaning happier individuals and better retention rates.
Train and Retrain
A major cause of inefficiency in the workplace is largely due to poor skills. For example, if you are in the business of selling metal hangars for airplanes, it is important that you setup a training plan that continuously instills into your employees the latest trends in the industry. You can also provide an eLearning platform that makes the training process that much more interesting.
Regular training sessions for your staff will increase their productivity while reducing time wasted as employees try to learn a new concept in the middle of a sales negotiation. In addition, training and education programs are some of the most desired employee benefits. The opportunity to learn new skills is one of the main reasons you will retain your top-performing employees.
Focus on Achievements
To the employee, achievements rank higher than just finishing a daily task or assignment. In fact, 83 percent of employees feel that workplace recognition was more rewarding than a tangible gift. While paying your employees for great work done may seem better, 70 percent find more meaning in recognition that has no tangible monetary value.
Today, it is not enough for an individual to have a job that runs from 9 to 5, get paid at the end of the week and never have to worry about performance. Your staff members, whether many or few, have to be driven by targets and an efficiency that produces tangible results that you can bank on. Poor productivity and low motivation has a way of affecting businesses and jeopardizing their sustainability, use the tips above to stem this from happening even before the problem rears its head.