Business owners and managers often wonder how they can improve the productivity of their employees. Studies show that a company with productive and engaged employees can gain 147% higher revenue than competitors in the same industry.
When determining what factors positively and negatively affect productivity, it’s important to understand how they relate to other aspects of the place of work. Achieving a high productivity rate is a success if it can be maintained.
Ways to Improve Productivity in Your Business
Here are a few crucial areas you can target to improve productivity in your business.
1. Eliminate Motivation Killers
Motivation is closely linked with productivity. Unmotivated employees simply bide away time instead of being productive. One way to help your employees be more productive is by eliminating motivation killers, like:
- Stress due to too much work
- Boredom
- Unfulfilling work
- Low career development opportunities
- Negative employees
Identifying issues like these is the real challenge, once you’ve done that, take steps to remove them. Ask your employees directly and offer them support if needed.
2. Avoid Micromanaging
It can often be tempting to micromanage most tasks, especially if you’ve built your business from the ground up yourself. Getting others to realize your point of view and vision of how the company should progress is a difficult task.
However, more often than not, micromanaging slows down operations. It also negatively affects your employees’ productivity if you don’t trust them and need to double-check everything they do. Instead, get a virtual data room like Firmex.com to efficiently manage and oversee project progress.
3. Stop Unnecessary Meetings
Unnecessary meetings are one of the biggest unintentional time wasters out there. There’s no point in holding a two-hour meeting with points that could have been summarized in an ordinary email.
Meetings should be saved for important matters that require discussion and brainstorming. If you don’t have anything progressive to talk about, there shouldn’t be more than a weekly team meeting. Convey information through other channels such as:
- Emails
- Phone calls
- Voice or video messages
4. Organize Responsibilities and Workflow
A big mistake made by many companies is not properly dispersing workloads. Often, some employees get more work than they can handle. That’s why it’s essential to implement a system to track employee responsibilities and workloads.
Doing so can streamline operations and assist teams in communicating regularly on projects and goals. By allowing your teams to align internally and operate consistently, you’ll be able to save tons of time and resources. Automating workflow organization can help lessen the effort required to handle time-consuming work.
5. Provide Wellness Initiatives
Wellness includes physical and mental well-being, which plays a crucial part in improving energy and productivity. So, business owners can directly help their employees increase productivity by offering benefits like on-site fitness equipment, weight-loss plans, health screenings, and adequate time off.
Lastly, this shouldn’t be restricted to your remote workers either. If a lot of employees are working from home, provide financial support to ensure they have equipment like an ergonomic office chair, desk, and work laptop.
