Want to boost employee productivity? That’s great, but workplace productivity won’t improve just by snapping your fingers – so you need to know what steps you can take to make it happen.
Make no mistake, it will take both time and effort to boost employee productivity, but these 11 tips can help to put you on the right track:
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- Recruit employees that are a good cultural fit by screening them thoroughly. The goal should be to try to find employees that share the same values and can work well with your existing team. The more the employees that you recruit fit in, the more energized and motivated your entire workforce will be.
Of course, to pull this off you first need to define your own company culture and strengthen it to attract more like-minded employees.
- Provide the right tools to improve your team’s performance, communication, collaboration, and productivity. You should focus on project management, business communication, and time tracking tools. To improve your communication strategy and connect with your clients on a deeper level, you can start with an automated text message campaign. SMS automation refers to text messages being automatically triggered based on conditions that have been set up in advance. These conditions can be set up to be as simple or as complex as you like. From basic ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions to niche scenarios, they are quite easy to set up.
On top of that employee monitoring software such as Work Examiner can help to track working hours, measure performance and identify areas where productivity can be improved.
- Train employee skills to improve the capabilities of existing employees and develop their skillsets. Ideally, the training you provide should help employees to advance their careers and can either be in-house or outsourced.
In itself, the training that you provide should help employees to be more productive. On top of that, the opportunities to improve skills and advance their careers should make it easier for you to recruit and retain top talent.
- Inculcate a positive communication culture that looks to the future. Research by CRM Learning has shown that both employee morale, as well as productivity, can be improved if a culture of positive communication that does not dwell on past mistakes is fostered in the workplace.
Although inculcating that type of culture can be difficult, a good place to start is by encouraging internal communication between team members, as well as with leaders and managers. Both formal staff meetings, as well as informal staff outings, can help on that front.
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- Allow employees to work remotely to provide them with more flexibility which can increase performance and productivity. In other words, you should give them the freedom to manage their time and work in a manner they feel is more productive.
If your concerned employees working remotely will result in time being wasted or them becoming distracted, there are ways to handle it. One option is to use Work Examiner to monitor remote workers and track their activity to ensure that they are productive.
- Encourage employees to share their thoughts and ideas and make your team feel safe to do so. It is important that your team feels comfortable enough to speak openly without having to fear that they’ll be criticized.
On your part, you should be open to listening to what employees have to say and carefully taking into account their thoughts and ideas too. If you do listen to them, you’ll find it easier to identify the areas that they feel affect their productivity the most.
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- Do not micromanage employees and give them more freedom to manage their own time and workload. Micromanaging employees can alienate them, cause them to burn out, and make them feel as though they aren’t trusted.
Giving up control will require some trust on your part, but the presence of Work Examiner will help you to ensure that time isn’t wasted and managers can intervene if and when any issue arises.
- Promote self-care among employees and encourage them to take care of their mental, physical and emotional health. If your employees are stressed or unhealthy their productivity will inevitably be much lower and they won’t feel very motivated.
It is possible to promote self-care in a number of different ways such as by providing health insurance, stress and time management training, or even practicing mindfulness techniques.
- Avoid over-policing social media even if you use Work Examiner or other tools that can track and restrict employee activity. If you restrict social media and other platforms too strictly it can affect the morale of your employees and make them less productive.
Instead of that you should adopt a more positive approach and allow users to access social media as long as their productivity isn’t affected.
- Incentivize performance and productivity by rewarding employees that do well with certain perks or privileges. To pull this off you need to inform employees about the incentives in advance, and clearly specify the targets they need to meet to claim them.
It would be best if the incentives that you offer are appealing to employees, such as free massages, paid vacations, and so on. Not only will these incentives encourage employees to be more productive, but it will also foster competition.
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- Track productivity metrics and analyze them carefully to identify areas that can be improved. That can be done using Work Examiner to monitor user activity and using its reports to analyze how productive employees are. It can then be used to streamline tasks, manage employees, and improve efficiency.
By tracking productivity metrics, you’ll be able to gather hard data regarding your employee’s work patterns, activity, and behavior. That data can then be analyzed so that you’re able to pinpoint any weaknesses and areas that need improvement.
Although each of the tips listed above can help, it is best if you use them to come up with a comprehensive plan. One way to do that is to use Work Examiner’s ability to monitor employees and develop ways to improve performance and productivity that center around it.
When it comes to improving productivity, the advantage of being able to monitor employees cannot be understated. It will let you acquire the data that you need to make informed decisions about which employees to focus on, and what areas need the most attention.
