By Abhinav M
One of the greatest challenges for team leaders and project managers across the world is boosting productivity of their team members. Fact is, even when an employee is appearing to work beyond office hours, it doesn’t necessarily mean increased efficiency. Out of the eight hours that employees spend in office typically, not all of them are being utilized to their potential. The result typically is that management assumes it requires more members on a team and goes on a hiring spree. This leads to rising costs and diminishing returns.
Employee engagement is pivotal to boosting productivity. It has been established by various surveys that most employees aren’t simply looking for a fat paycheck or a long list of amenities. While these are certainly incredible perks, what really motivates employees to work efficiently towards business success is the sense of belonging to a team that they feel a sense of commitment towards.
There is a certain fine balance that needs to be achieved between being aggressively for results-driven and at the same time, taking into consideration employee needs. In this blog post, we’ll explore specific methods in which you can use to help employees manage time and improve productivity by ensuring that you are eliminating management strategies that are not conducive to productivity.
1. Trust Your Employees
Micromanagement can do a lot of damage to an employee’s morale. On one hand, they will feel disempowered because you are trying to keep tabs on their every move, and on the other hand, it can also lead to increased dependency, therefore causing a vicious circle of diminished productivity.
Hold your employees accountable for their inputs and decisions. This motivates them to put in greater effort into ensuring that they are delivering high quality work throughout their projects. Instilling accountability and allowing your employees to feel a sense of ownership that encourages them to be thorough with their work, leaving little room for errors, and also provides them far greater satisfaction in seeing a job well done.
Trusting your employees, that you have obviously hired after an exhaustive screening process, is key to workplace productivity. When mistakes do happen, take the time to speak to the employee, find out what went wrong and strategize together on how it can be avoided a similar mistake can be avoided in the future. The trick is to manage, but not micro-manage; support, but not coddle.
2. Reward Good Performance
It is vital that management teams prioritize employee recognition in order to build a positive and productive environment for employees. Whether it is a simple thank you, or presenting well performing employees with a meaningful gift or reward, an act of recognition will help your employees feel appreciated and feel motivated to contribute in greater measure. While offering pay increases or bonuses have their place, recognition is often an even bigger factor in ensuring that employees are satisfied with their job.
3. Equip Your Employees with the Right Resources and Tools
Supporting your employees in achieving their goals is crucial to long-term business success. This support can manifest in a variety of ways: providing employees with upgraded equipment, allowing them work flexibility when required, providing them with avenues to upgrade their skills through certifications or seminars, and so on.
Identify employees who are passionate about learning and improving their skills, and proactively discuss training opportunities with them. Creating avenues for them to attend training courses will introduce them to new and efficient ways of doing their job, which will directly impact overall organizational productivity. Sometimes, a skill upgrade could be achieved simply by having a senior member in the organization sharing their learnings and experiences.
4. Keep Things Interesting
You’ve hired your employee to perform a specific job, and if they are doing a good job of it, it’s hard to miss the fact that often repetitive work can become boring. Why not sit down with individual employees to learn what other areas of job responsibilities they would be interested to explore? This would break the monotony and allow your staff to broaden their skill set and also gives them a deeper understanding of how the business works.
5. Work Smarter, Not Harder
Enable your employees to work smarter by equipping them with productivity tools. There are a wide variety available in the market that you can choose from to fit your specific organizational needs and goals.
Working towards increasing productivity benefits everyone — the organization and individual employees. And it can be achieved through simple changes applied on a daily basis. Have you used any specific productivity hacks to improve productivity at your organization? Do let us know your thoughts in comments below.
Photo credit: Productive office from Gaidamashchuk/Shutterstock
