Employee productivity is important. Especially for small businesses. If one employee is not productive it is practically impossible for the other members of a small team to pick up the slack.
Good productivity has to be a priority. But that does not mean pushing your team, or yourself, to the brink. Far from it. You want to keep your team together. Nothing kills a business faster than staffing churn, which is exactly what you get when you just crack the whip. People leave in their droves.
Fortunately, there are far more subtle, gentle, yet effective ways to boost productivity, here are 8 of them:
Create a winning environment
Create a clean, bright, clutter-free space for your employees. De-cluttering is especially important.
Clutter creates a chaotic working environment. Having to hunt around for a missing tool or memo, is highly frustrating. It wastes energy as well as time and prevents people from getting into a steady workflow.
Set people up to achieve
When we are distracted or trying to multitask it is impossible to be productive. Making sure that everyone has a quiet place to work and giving them easy access to the tools and training they need is essential.
Make company culture a priority
Having the right company culture is not a luxury. It is essential and has a high impact on productivity. When you get your culture right, recruiting talented and dedicated people becomes a lot easier. It also makes it far more likely that you will retain those employees. A recent study carried out by the UK recruitment specialists, Robert Waters, shows that 73% of professionals had left a job because of a poor cultural fit.
Studies show that when people are regularly reminded of the company´s values, mission, and team goals, they work better. Digital signs can be used to promote productivity in several ways, including sharing short videos and images that remind people of the company´s values and mission. They are also good for sharing results, celebrating success, advertising team-building events, and training opportunities. All of which improve productivity.
Map and continuously tweak your processes
Mapping your processes sounds incredibly tedious. But doing so brings many benefits. It enables you to identify inefficiencies, which are costing you time and money.
It also makes it far easier for you to provide everyone with clear instructions. As well as greatly speeding up the onboarding process for new employees.
The trick here is to get into the habit of doing it for every new task or change. Ideally, you want process mapping to become 2nd nature to everyone. This creates teams where each individual is always actively looking for the best way to achieve something. To map your existing processes, start with a small task, map that, then move on to the other processes that feed into it.
Keep control of time spent in meetings
Meetings just suck up the time. To attend, your staff have to stop what they are doing, get up and go to another area. This in itself wastes a lot of time. Then, usually, they will spend a significant percentage of the meeting politely listening to others discuss aspects of the project in which they are not directly involved.
According to Altassian, the teamwork specialists behind workflow and productivity tools like, Jira, Confluence, and Trello, the average worker spends 31 hours a month in meetings! That is crazy.
As far as possible, minimise the number of meetings held and limit how long they last.
Standing meetings typically do the trick.
Scheduling no meeting days also helps. It tends to make people think twice before calling one on the days they are permitted.
Build breaks into the workday
This next one sounds counterintuitive but ensuring people take breaks works. It is however not easy to get the balance right, so you may have to experiment a bit. These suggestions are a good starting point, just click the link to read them.
At the very least, get everyone to leave their desk or workstation to eat their lunch and provide tea and coffee making facilities. It is also nice when the boss occasionally turns up with a treat to celebrate a win. Especially, when everyone takes an extra break to enjoy it together.
Encourage continuous learning
Showing your employees that you value them greatly improves productivity. Especially if you do it by offering them the chance to advance themselves.
Studies show that most people appreciate additional training (you can read one of those studies here). It improves skillsets, which in itself helps employees to be more productive. While at the same time reducing turnover, which also boosts overall productivity.
Don´t be daunted
Boosting productivity takes a lot of effort, but it is always worth it. When you approach it right, you end up with a happier workforce that feels fulfilled, proud of their achievements, and is actively looking for ways to improve productivity further.
Photo by Tamanna Rumee on Unsplash
