There are many aspects at play when managing your business, but only a few are as important as productivity. Employee and workplace productivity is vital to the company’s growth and profitability. But bosses tend to undermine its importance until operations grind to a halt due to low productivity. To avoid this scenario, keep your company’s productivity maxed up with these strategies.
Provide your team with the right tools
Your team needs the right tools to complement their skills. The right tools will streamline their workflow and make work a lot easier for the entire team. Equip them with time and productivity tracking applications, so they would know exactly what needs to be done and by when, allowing them to budget their time efficiently.
To simplify and promote teamwork, allow them to work together in real-time regardless of their location with online collaboration tools, such as Trello and Google Drive.
Since it is easy to lose track of messages via email, let the team communicate using instant messaging apps, such as Twist and Slack, where conversations stay organised and messages are easy to keep track of. Make sure that the communication platform offers file sharing and access to keep the team’s workflow as streamlined as can be.
Improve their skills through training
In-house training greatly benefits both employees and employers. It improves employee retention rates, creativity, performance, and even leads to customer satisfaction, reducing the effort and resources you spend correcting mistakes and solving problems that were caused by bad performance.
Employees tend to perform poorly when they do not know exactly what they are supposed to do, how to do it, and why they need to do it a certain way. During their training, the details of the job are explained to them, effectively solving these performance problems. The clarification will then improve their confidence and morale on the job, promoting loyalty to the company.
Do not micromanage
One of the most effective ways to manage your business productivity is for managers to back off. Micromanagement is a common practice but is actually detrimental to healthy company management.
To encourage productivity, you need to let your employees take ownership over the way they manage their own resources and time. You want self-starters who are able to operate independently. And granting a worker freedom over how, when, and where they work reinforces their work ethic in a way that controlling them would not.
However, micromanagement can be second nature to some managers, especially those who have made a habit of it and garnered great results through it.
If you are one of these managers, start trusting your people to manage minute operations and coach them when needed, instead of doing it for them. Letting go and allowing your subordinates to take control spares you a continuous and unproductive loop, where your constant hovering makes employees feel nervous and perform poorly.
As a manager, making even the smallest changes can drastically improves productivity and efficiency in your workplace. But if you want to go the extra mile, provide employees with the right tools, knowledge, and space to grow and succeed along with your company.
