Keeping your employees on the task can be a hard challenge that cannot be resolved directly. Watching your staff the whole day to see if they are doing their job can waste a lot of time that you can use elsewhere. Hence, increasing productivity needs you to look at intrinsic factors like the motivations of the staff, their skills, the root cause of the distractions, and more. Here are five ways to increase the productivity of your workforce.
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Training and Development
Many companies normally eliminate employee training in order to save money and time as they hope employees will learn on the job. But this might backfire. Forcing the staff to learn their jobs without training can be very inefficient as they might not be able to focus on work that they hardly understand. Hence, it is crucial to create time to ensure that employees’ skills are continually developed in line with the needs of the organization. This will equip them with the required skills to accomplish tasks with minimal time wastage. Employee development can include seminars, mentoring, coaching, courses, increased responsibilities, and workshops. This offers them the additional skills they need to accomplish their duties.
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Implement Telecommuting
Letting your staff work remotely from home might appear inefficient. However, according to research, employees who work from home have a 13 percent likelihood of being more productive than their office-based colleagues. Allowing your staff to operate from home will help them save time they might have used commuting, looking for lunch, and holding face-to-face meetings. You only need to ensure they have adequate home security features that will ensure their safety and that of company property as they work from home.
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Offer Incentives
An efficient way to get employees to remain on task is to provide them a reason to do so. Recognizing that a team member has done an excellent job will make them feel encouraged and appreciated, which will make them more productive. As you decide how to reward productive employees, be sure to consider their personal preferences and needs. For instance, some team members might appreciate a private congratulations while other employees might need public recognition. Other incentives you might want to implement include handwritten notes, paid time off, free meals, wellness programs, and more.
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Effective Communication
It is obvious that communication is essential to a productive workforce. Due to technology, managers can communicate with their employees with the tap of a button. However, according to research by McKinsey, it was discovered that emails consume almost 28 percent of the time of an employee. It also revealed that emails are the number two most time-consuming task for employees, after job-related activities. Replace most of your emails with social networking tools like Slack that allows for speedy team communication. You can also advise your staff to embrace a more antiquated contact form like voice-to-voice communication occasionally. Having a quick phone call or meeting can sort out a matter that might have consumed hours to resolve via email.
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Match Tasks to Expertise
Knowing the expertise and behavioral styles of your workers is crucial for maximizing efficiency. For instance, an out-of-the-box, creative, and extroverted thinker is probably the best individual to pitch ideas to customers. But they can have a hard time if they are offered a more detail oriented and rule-intensive task. Asking your staff to be great at everything is inefficient. Hence, before handing out assignments, determine if the employee is the ideal person for the job. Otherwise, get someone else with the expertise and styles that match your requirements.
As you look to make your staff more productive, be sure to see what motivates each of them. If one of them prefers a holiday as an incentive, another might prefer money. Customizing incentives as well as communicating effectively, matching tasks to expertise, training employees, and allowing telecommuting will be sure to boost the morale of your workforce and get things done.
