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10 Foolproof Methods to Increase Employee Productivity in Your Company

Employees remain one of the most valuable assets for any company. That’s because workers are responsible for the most critical tasks that keep the business ticking.

To achieve your company’s goals, workers have to be productive and maintain specific performance standards. Now, apart from hiring the right hands, there are other challenges that can hinder employee productivity, and many of those are down to employee management.

That said, with the right management practices, employers can maximize each worker’s productivity. This post outlines 10 steps to increasing productivity for small business employees.

Let’s begin.

Communication: Build Team Collaboration

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Communication is the beating heart of collaboration and teamwork. You must encourage your employees to always reach out to each other even on minor issues. That way, everyone is able to confirm processes before executing actions. This working model leads to lesser errors and boosts positive results.

You can boost communication by organizing regular meetings to remind everyone that they’re part of a team that should work as a unit. While meetings are important, make sure you run them in moderation to avoid wasting your workers’ time.

You should also provide the right tools for communication, especially if you run a virtual office. Work-from-home employees can easily forget that they work with other team members and take things into their hands. So, remind them to always use the communication tools at their disposal to reach out to workers.

Making team communication a core part of your company culture is another way to get workers to stay in touch with each other. You should attach consequences to mistakes that can be avoided through communication.

Team Building Activities: Boost Teamwork

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Team building activities are engagements designed to help workers to strengthen their bond and energize the team spirit. These activities are fun, competitive in a friendly way, and lively. They help employees to socialize and build relationships outside of work.

You can organize workshops outside the office to help employees learn new skills together. These workshops could include cooking, painting, and even safety classes.

You could also engage in fitness activities, games, and trivia. For example, you can organize baseball or soccer games from time to time and group employees into two separate teams. This way, they get to strategize as team members to compete.

For remote workplaces, there are many ideas for virtual team-building activities. You can:

  • Host virtual workout sessions,
  • Get workers to show each other their home office setups,
  • Organize virtual book clubs,
  • Play online games, such as massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG).

Track Productivity: Use Performance Metrics to Your Advantage

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Tracking employee performance helps you understand your workers’ strengths and limits and empowers you to make the right assignment decisions. But productivity tracking is more than monitoring hours worked and tasks completed.

You have to look at workers individually, what they do right, how they do it, and where they struggle.

You’re monitoring everything, from how long it takes to complete a particular task and how well they follow instructions, to how they collaborate with others.

There are different metrics that you can use to measure how well an employee is doing.

The 360-degree feedback method involves interviewing a worker’s peers, subordinates, supervisors, colleagues, and clients about their performance. It renders a multi-perspective assessment of the worker.

With 180-degree feedback, only the worker’s direct supervisors and colleagues are involved in the process.

You can also use tools such as time trackers and project management solutions to evaluate productivity.

Leverage the Right Tools: Empower Employees

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Regardless of their job description or position, every worker needs the right tools and resources to succeed.

Providing those tools goes beyond getting them a desk and a computer. There are role-specific resources required to pull off great productivity numbers.

That way, workers don’t have to deal with the frustration of finding their own means to get things done.

Moreover, workers who are adequately furnished with the resources they need are not just productive, but also highly engaged. They’ll show more loyalty and dedication to the job, all of which helps the company reduce turnover and boost profitability.

You should provide tools for communication, project management, and collaboration alongside other job-specific tools.

For new recruits, ensure you provide adequate training for the tools you already have on ground.

Avoid Micromanagement: Enhance Employee Autonomy

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Employees generally struggle in environments where they don’t feel trusted and free. That’s the kind of workplace that micromanagement facilitates.

You may be tempted to believe that your team can’t succeed without your input at every level. You’re afraid that workers could mess things up if they handle things their way.

But involving yourself in every operation does the exact opposite.

Workers will no longer feel comfortable with their work, reducing their morale and motivation. This in turn leads to decreased energy and lower output and productivity.

You can prevent these problems from occurring by building the trust you have with workers. Allow them a level of autonomy over their work process and focus on the results.

They’ll agree with you that things need to change if their methods aren’t producing the required results.

Your job is to clearly define your expectations and goals and allow them to deliver.

Prevent Burnout: Keep Workers in Shape for Work

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Burnout is a bane on productivity and employee welfare. Workers who consistently put in long hours don’t just experience reduced energy to work but also suffer serious health issues.

Catering to your workers’ welfare should be one of your foremost concerns. Doing that means you’ll be preventing health problems and keeping your employees fit for work.

What’s more, employees will leave a workplace to secure their welfare if they associate it with stress. That makes high turnover another negative effect of overwork.

You can prevent overwork and burnout by creating company policies that encourage breaks and time off. Manage your workload in such a way that employees aren’t burdened with too much work.

You should also use employee monitoring tools so that you can identify workers who are about to overwork and rotate their shifts accordingly.

Make sure you define working hours and enforce it. Workers should drop whatever they’re doing once it’s time to clock out. While exceptions can be made to get critical projects over the line, ensure you offer time off for rest in those situations.

Recognize and Reward Employees: Leverage the Power of Extrinsic Motivation

There’s a universally shared human need to feel appreciated and valued. This phenomenon occurs in every aspect of life and with everyone we have a relationship with, from friends and family to colleagues and bosses.

A simple “thank you” or “well done” comes with a good feeling.

The feeling is more important for workers who need reminders to believe their work matters and they deserve their pay.

When you promote a culture of recognition, you boost workplace morale and motivate workers to replicate their achievements. That level of engagement and dedication translates to improved productivity.

Also, employees tend to be less likely to leave a workplace where they feel valued. So, recognizing your workers will not only boost productivity, but also save you the cost of employee turnover.

There are different ways to recognize a worker. You can announce their achievements to the entire team during meetings, reward them with paid vacations or promotions, or praise them privately.

Discourage Multitasking: Focus on Single-Tasking

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Multitasking slows everyone down. If you’re trying to do two things at once, you’ll be spending more time executing them. That’s because you’ll have to switch from task to task, breaking concentration at intervals.

So, encourage your workers to avoid multitasking and focus on one task at a time.

You can recommend apps that block distractions such as social media websites and emails. You can also encourage and train workers on using time management techniques like the Pomodoro Technique.

Eliminate Time Wasters: Promote Effective Scheduling

Some activities shouldn’t make it to your workers’ schedule. These include unnecessary meetings, check-ins, and emails.

These activities steal valuable time from their main work schedule, reducing productivity.

So, identify and eliminate time-wasting tasks that workers are obligated to handle.

Try to only organize meetings when they’re absolutely necessary. If a circular information or announcement can suffice, call off the meeting and allow your staff to focus on their work.

You should also help workers develop a method to deal with emails, as they can also consume time and distract workers. Employees should pick out a time slot to respond to non-critical emails and declutter their inboxes.

Take Advantage of Automation

Mundane and repetitive tasks can reduce productivity, just like time-wasters.

The good thing is that you can use automation tools to remove these tasks from your workers’ schedule.

For example, they don’t have to manually pass work on to the next person in the workflow and send a follow-up email. A project management solution can transfer the task and alert the next person automatically.

Automatic time tracking is another way to leverage automation. These tools can automatically track billable hours and generate timesheets that can be used to process payroll. This process saves your HR and accounting department valuable time.

Conclusion

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Improving your workers’ productivity is a continuous process. Above all, ensure you provide and maintain a healthy working environment to keep workers engaged and satisfied with their jobs.