The average employee works for an average of three hours per day. And for organizations trying to maximize their growth potential, that can be a big problem.
While you can’t blame your employees for not operating at peak productivity every minute of every day, you do need them to deliver consistent results and be efficient at moving through all the tasks they are assigned. But as an employer, a big part of the blame for lack of productivity falls on your shoulders as well.
If you want your employees to succeed and excel in their positions, you need to provide them with the tools, knowledge, and processes to get more work done each day and prioritize effectively.
With that in mind, let’s explore some of the key strategies you can utilize to boost employee productivity and help your teams succeed consistently.
Monitor Your Employee Work Habits
Employee monitoring has got somewhat of a bad reputation. The idea of the employer looming over the shoulder of its workers and tracking every minute of their work can seem intrusive and unnecessary.
However, if you utilize productivity monitoring software the right way, it can be viewed as a tool for helping your employees become better and not as a form of punishment or control.
When you know how your employees spend their time, it’s not just about ensuring that they’re not wasting it on activities unrelated to their job. It’s just as much about helping your employees notice bottlenecks in their actions and discover better ways to structure their day.
By monitoring employee activities, you can gain valuable insights into employee work habits on a larger scale, learning exactly how your teams operate and the go-to approaches in various scenarios. Then, you can work with team leaders in identifying ways to potentially improve the way employees tackle tasks or prioritize activities, which can lead to significant improvements in performance.
And by enabling your teams to perform better, you can increase work satisfaction, employee engagement, and the results you are able to achieve.
Prioritize Communication Skills
It’s hard to overestimate the importance of communication in the workplace. Teams that know how to communicate effectively can resolve even complex problems and quickly allocate tasks to make the most of the available time. Meanwhile, teams with poor communication skills will suffer from a range of bottlenecks that stifle progress and make it very hard for people to work in unison towards a common goal.
Consequently, forward-thinking companies make continually improving communication a top priority in the workplace. Through communication coaching programs and the implementation of communication tools, organizations can completely reshape how their teams collaborate, share information, and help each other grow.
The bottom line is that you can’t expect your teams to implement the best communication practices on their own. Without guidance, most teams will develop ways of sharing information and collaborating, but the methods they use aren’t likely to be the best according to today’s research and standards.
Meanwhile, if you bring in communication experts who can help your teams learn and discover weak areas in their communication, you are likely to see a significant boost in workplace productivity in the short term from that alone. Then, you can build on the initial success by continually revisiting how your team communicates.
Set Goals
In order to function at their best, your employees need clear directions and something to strive for. For this reason, as an employer, it is your job to provide them with structure and guidance so that each employee always knows what they have to do and the best way of approaching the task.
You need to develop a process of communicating with each team member, not just team managers, about what is expected of them, what the short-term and long-term goals are, and how they can make the most of their time and skills at this time.
What’s more, you should also listen to the feedback, expectations, and concerns of your employees, designing tasks and goals that fit with their strengths, aspirations, and career goals. That way, you will not only provide the necessary information for an employee to work more effectively but will also give them more motivation to excel in their role, which could lead to career growth opportunities within the company.
Recognize Excellent Performance
Recognition is a crucial yet often neglected part of running an organization. It’s easy to take your employee performance for granted and as something to be expected, but that is a guaranteed path towards lower employee engagement and job satisfaction.
When your team members work hard at their jobs and accomplish their goals, it’s vital to show them that the company recognizes their hard work and appreciates it. Even if it’s as simple as a congratulatory email or a positive chat about their performance, that can show that they are noticed and that it can lead to a bigger role in the future. If you want to take it a step further, you could even create incentives and bonuses for accomplishing goals and reaching milestones.
Conclusion
Productivity is a crucial factor in your company’s success. So, it’s vital to find the right strategies for making consistent improvements.
With the strategies outlined above, you can understand the biggest productivity challenges within your company and find the best strategies for moving in the right direction.
