10 Tips To Improve Productivity In The Workplace

While employees are certainly responsible for the level of productivity in a business, the level of organisation and other factors from the management side are just as important. Here are a few things to take into consideration when trying to raise the level of productivity.

1. Create a Pleasing Environment

If your team is a team and not a pit of gladiators fighting against each other, your company will get a lot more things done.

It’s a lot better to have a group of people who work together, help and feed ideas to each other, than people who need to watch their back and try to keep all good ideas for themselves for fear of the competition.

2. Make Your Employees Happy

Underpaid, overworked employees will eventually flee your company in droves. Give them good benefits, a good pay for the work they do and occasional rewards when they excel, and you’ll have them stay, providing step 1 is in place.

3. Assign Proper Roles

If things don’t get done it might be for several reasons:

a. Someone is incompetent along the line – due to either not knowing their job or to not being particularly on the ball

b. The workflow bottlenecked somewhere

c. There is no one in charge or there is no position to take care of it

You solve these issues by:

a. Training your personnel and locating the ones that are not capable of doing their job and put them onto some other task

b. Reorganise the workflow and redistribute the workload, but if those aren’t enough hire more personnel

c. Put someone in charge or be quick at spotting where a new position needs to be created to deal with the traffic that is meeting a dead end

4. Make Sure Your Employees Have All They Need

If they are going to do work that needs a powerful computer, while trying to keep the costs down, make sure you give them one that is capable of doing the functions it needs to do. Getting a slightly more expensive computer now might save you money by cutting down execution times.

Make sure they have enough printer toner if they have a printer for example, and make sure it’s stocked up or quickly ordered. A secretary would find it very hard to send your personalised letters by the end of the day without it.

Same goes for supplies and office stationery.

5. Communicate

Be transparent when possible. Hold staff meetings, let people know they can reach you whenever they need to, within limits of course. If you are the manager of a company with 700 people it might be a little hard to speak to everyone.

Regardless there should always be clear communication between people in a business, a misunderstood order might cause a lot of hassle later.

6. Encourage and Motivate

Don’t give feedback only when it’s negative. It’s all well and good to consider perfection as the norm so that it goes unacknowledged, until you realise that nobody’s perfect and the lack of recognition makes people think they good efforts are not valued.

7. Set Realistic Targets

You can’t really get anything done without targets. Sometimes there will just be situations where you have to get things done quickly, but a frantic workplace can’t be the norm unless you want to stress your employees to death.

It’s also a very good idea to encourage your employees to set targets by themselves. If they do they will gain more control over their workload and will realise they can produce more.

8. Plan When Needed

Plans are important. Don’t forget to set them and let your employee knows what they are so that they can move in the right direction. Hold meetings when required.

9. Act When Needed

Which should be way more often than when you hold meetings. You need to have people actually do the jobs, if you just bombard them with meeting after meeting after meeting they will not get anything done.

10. Implement Options for Training

Things evolve, especially technology. Make sure you keep your staff up to date with courses or in-house training.

Do you have any tips for improving productivity — or, even better, any horror stories of productivity drives gone wrong?

Let us know in the comments!