Productivity is an essential quality for any business that wants to thrive. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. If you can’t get a team productive, then you can get the groundwork done that your business needs to keep up with its demands. If you’re feeling like that productivity isn’t one of the current strong suits of your business, you need to look into why that is the case. It’s a much deeper question than just finding those who are lazier than you would like.
Set your standards
The most important part of creating a productive workplace is establishing what exactly that means. You probably your overarching goals lined out for the business as a whole and the steps you need to take to fulfil that strategy. But how clearly do you set out goals for your employees? Do you give them goals that are easily understood, with specific objectives, ends, and methods to measure them? If not, then your employees are working with abstracts and will never know quite how far they are in their tasks. Even worse, you can’t track and identify that progress or review their performance, either. You won’t be able to tell how productive or unproductive they are.
Make it easier to share
The flow of information and resources throughout the workplace are just as important to how productive it can be. If people can’t access what they need when they need it, then they face a bottleneck they can’t beat on their own. They have to wait or even interrupt someone else’s work to access it. The realm of the business where you have the most room to prevent that kind of bottleneck is in the digital side of it. Setting up a connected IT system throughout and even beyond the office with the help of services like www.delta-comtech.co.uk/it-consultancy makes it much less of a fuss for your employees to get what they need. As for physical resources, you just need to think about how many people need them, where they are and the best place to put them so they’re as accessible to as many of those people as possible.
Photo SourceManage those workloads
Multitasking is lauded as a great skill to have. Indeed, in management positions, you’re going to have to rely on it. But it shouldn’t be your first option. Multitasking is a skill you should rely on when all else fails. That’s because it’s a lot less productive to jump from task to task and back again than it is to focus on one thing at a time. Teaching time management and workload prioritization skills to your team is going to help them take it step-by-step rather than jumping from one method to another. For instance, teaching them to batch similar tasks will have them switching out toolsets and mindsets a lot less often. They keep their head in the game of one kind of task for longer which means they don’t need as much time to acclimate when moving from one objective to the next.
Happiness has a real effect
The mental and emotional state of your employees are going to play a big role in just how productive and motivated you can expect them to be. If someone isn’t 100% behind the work they’re doing and the goals they’re reaching, that lack of incentive will slow them down. There are a lot of ways to help them get that engagement, however. A better understanding of their place and importance in a project or goal is a start. But don’t disregard the powerful impact of a more welcoming and pleasant working environment or even a bit of compensation or reward for good work.
Photo SourceKeep communication clear
Good communication is as important as good sharing of resources. But it’s important to realise this means relying on more than one means of communication. As http://blog.jostle.me/blog/5-types-of-internal-communications-businesses-must-have-to-thrive/, you need different types of communication.Emails can be good for one-sided briefings and information sharing, for instance, but are too disruptive for back-and-forth conversations. Whereas teleconferencing can help you manage that back-and-forth with multiple people when their full attention is needed for the conversation. Symmetrical and asymmetrical, casual and urgent, you need different forms of communication ready to most effectively share information and ideas based on the context of the situation.
As a business owner, the temptation is there to blame your employees for a dip in productivity. Indeed, sometimes it is their fault. But you can’t be sure of that until you’ve established your goals and ensured they have all the tools they need to reach them. The method should always be the first place you look, not those using the method.
