Employees are the lifeblood of any company. If they are not working efficiently, exhibiting a high rate of productivity, then your company’s overall performance will suffer. This means you are paying a lot in employee wages, but not getting enough in return. This is bad for business. The following are five methods to increase productivity among your employees.
Have Social Outings
There is a social component to an office full of colleagues that cannot be overlooked. If your employees are active, happy and enjoy working together, then you are more likely to get productivity to increase. One way to get employees to operate this way is through cleverly planned social outings. It is important to pick outings that encourage both socialization, some degree of teamwork and even some friendly competitive activities. You might even learn which employees actually work best together on these outings.
Allow Work From Home
Some employees will give you ten times the productivity from home than they ever would in the office. It really comes down to giving an employee the right environment to stimulate and motivate their productivity. When you take this away from an employee, you are really trying their hands up and making it more difficult for them to give you they’re all. Something as simple as being able to spend a little more time with family is all some employees need to increase their productivity.
Get Rid of Meetings
Countless hours of the work day are wasted in frivolous meetings. Worse, meetings take your employees away from their desk, and the meeting does not really involve certain employees as much as others. All this spells waste in productivity, and it needs to be a point of reform in terms of how your business operates. First, assess if a meeting is really that important. If not, do not waste company time with it. Secondly, make sure that only the people who need to attend a meeting are there, not those whose time is better spent at their desk working hard.
Making the workplace Safe and Healthy for Your Employees
Sitting or standing all work day is not healthy for employees which is why international literature reports that employees should be looking to sit less (Owen et al, 2010), however, it does not necessarily suggest that we need to stand more (Halim & Omar, 2015; Messing et al, 2005), instead active movement may be the most useful and cost-effective option.
”Recommendations from the Department of Health also recommend avoiding long periods of sitting and to get up as much as possible.”
In essence, movement throughout the day is critical for preserving the health of employees. This, in turn, helps to get the blood flowing which makes it easier to stay productive, instead of becoming tired and sluggish throughout the day.
Setting Goals
One way to motivate your employees is by putting goals in place that must be met. Goals not only identify a clear direction for your employees to work towards, but they can often introduce a degree of urgency that is missing when goals are not set. Goals can be a cause for a little friendly office competition too. This can be a fantastic way to push employees to be more productive without needing to necessarily crack the whip.
Use Results to Help Employees Grow
Results are a measure of how well your employees are performing. They help you to first identify those employees who need to be acknowledged for excellence in productivity and those who need some work getting their stats up to par. As a manager, it is your job to put pressure where the pressure is needed to get all your subordinates performing at a healthy pace to ensure increased productivity from one assessment period to the next.
Conclusion
Productivity is the goal of any business seeking to make money. However, employees need reasons to motivate them to produce. Some employees simply want more recognition, others want more autonomy and yet others simply want free gourmet coffee to motivate higher rates of productivity. It may seem a little low tech, but one of the best ways to get to the root of this problem is to simply ask what motivates an employee to produce more, and then provide that kind of motivation.
