Twelve tips to enhance employee productivity for small businesses
Are you struggling to boost the productivity of your small business? Does a distributed workforce add to your woes of declining productivity? If this is the case, then the 12 productivity-enhancing tips listed in this article can dispel all your worries. From embracing work monitoring software to strategies that guarantee top-notch employee performance, this article covers it all.
Twelve productivity-enhancing tips for small business
Devise a daily plan
Inspire your followers to learn more and do more by being the leader they look up to. Setting clear priorities at the start of each day will help keep you on track. Not only will the practices help you accomplish your tasks effectively, but your colleagues will also be inspired to follow suit.
Trust your employees with achievable daily goals.
Create a list of deliverable goals for your employees. This ensures that your employees remain focused and do not lose track of daily activities. It is found that having practical goals and well-defined priorities is likely to motivate employees to work more productively.
However, the goals must be attainable and realistic. As long as the tasks are within the employee’s capability, they will be motivated to perform them.
Encourage accountability
In order to achieve optimum productivity, setting goals alone will not suffice. Before you set goals, ensure the employees are putting in the required effort. Monitor your employees and validate their productivity using work productivity monitoring software.
Identify the outcomes you wish your team to achieve and work backwards from there to break down the outcomes into quantifiable sub-goals. Clear expectations can bring more accountability.
Block distractions
Studies have shown that employees are productive during a typical workday only for a few hours. Getting distracted during those crucial hours could mean a completely wasted day. In order to deal with distractions, you must first identify what causes them. If using smartphones is a problem, then ask your employees to turn off their notifications and social media accounts that keep them hooked to their phones. Make sure that your employees refrain from using their phones during work hours.
Distractions can undermine the productivity of remote workers without a doubt. Encourage your employees to visualize and suggest that they keep a notebook to track distracting thoughts. Furthermore, you should also check the websites that might interfere with your workers’ focus on work.
Make your workspace fun
A productive workplace is crucial to employee satisfaction. Corporate giants allocate significant funds to ensure that workplaces are adapted properly for employee satisfaction. Due to the current workplace landscape, dominated by distributed workforces, virtual substitutes are growing in great demand.
Schedule a virtual party for your employees. You can even send lunch vouchers to your colleagues and arrange a video call so that everyone can eat together. Team activities like this can make your staff more valued and boost their productivity.
Automate the redundant tasks
There are innumerable mundane and redundant tasks in your business that need to be monitored manually. Working on these tasks each day can consume a significant amount of productive time. As AI tools are becoming more affordable, small businesses must consider investing in automation tools so that employees can save time for important tasks.
There is a gamut of solutions available now, with the digitization of infrastructure becoming more prevalent. Now is the time to assess your business functions and identify the ones that can be automated and those that require human intelligence.
Do not let your employees multitask
Multitasking employees can be valuable to the organization. But multitasking often prevents them from performing efficiently. Most employees fail to handle multiple tasks effectively. Hence, assign your employees the optimum number of tasks they can handle instead of overloading them with unachievable responsibilities.
Discourage employees from working overtime
Who doesn’t want their work to be perfect? But this zeal for perfection can sometimes lead employees to work overtime. It is important to understand that perfection is an unachievable goal that leaves perfectly working employees exhausted and unmotivated.
As an employer, you must ensure that your goals are within reach and attainable for your employees. Extending work hours to attain perfection might eventually lead to burnout and reduced productivity. Work productivity monitoring software should be implemented to ensure employees are not working longer hours than required.
Bank on cloud and other technologies
Technology has become an integral part of every business today. No matter whether you are looking to increase sales or to recruit the right staff, technology makes your business seamless and efficient.
Cloud computing is one of the hottest technologies right now. Besides the fact that this technology allows remote working, its contribution to reducing tangible resources is commendable. Cloud enables you and your employees to gain access to relevant information from anywhere, anytime, thus enabling business on the go.
Increase your talent pool by engaging freelancers
The advent of reliable cloud technology and wider network accessibility has enabled access to abundant talent resources. The number of freelancers is rising now, and they could be the perfect solution for the increasing demands of a talented workforce. Freelance websites will enable you to recruit world-class employees at an affordable cost.
Make effective use of FAQs, emails and chats for communication.
The process of explaining business and tasks is considered a time-consuming one in the world of business. You may have to explain the same thing repeatedly during a knowledge transfer session. Preparing a well-crafted FAQ page on your website is one of the best ways to eliminate this mundane task. With this, you can save a significant amount of time by skipping client calls that seek the same information over and over. Encourage clients to communicate through emails, which can reduce your telephonic communications to a great extent.
In order to simplify and ease internal communication, use services like chat messenger applications. This can avoid spamming your official email with unnecessary messages and limit its usage for client and partner communications only.
Allocate schedules and locations that work for your employees
Flexibility at work is an important factor in ensuring maximum productivity. Offer your employees time management flexibility so that they can get the work done more quickly. Employees are likely to yield more results when they are allowed to create schedules that work for them. Encourage your employees to follow these rules while working remotely.
- Monitor work hours with employees monitoring software.
- Keep workspaces tidy
- Engage in virtual team building activities
- Prevent health problems by using ergonomic furniture
- Turn off your machines after work hours
- Get a good night’s sleep
