Driving Employee Productivity: A Guide

Productivity means getting the most out of your employees during their working hours. You expect your employees to apply themselves as much as possible in order to make for an efficient, high-energy, and high-yield business model. Without this motivated and productive routine, your business will lose custom while disappointing customers. As such, efficiency in your business is driven, in large part, by employee productivity – and that’s the focus of this article, which aims to show you how to better motivate productivity in your workforce.

Onboarding and Training

In business, your focus is usually on the journeys of your customers and the impressions that consumers have of your brand, your marketing materials, and your website. However, what if you turn the mirror inwards, asking: what are my employees’ journeys like, and how can I make them more informed and productive?

When you begin to do this, you come to realize that getting your workers onto the same page through an elegant onboarding process and smart training sessions can really give them a boost. No employee likes the feeling of being kept in the dark when it comes to what they should be focusing on – and it’s your responsibility to enlighten them in this regard, showing them how, when, and where to work so that they can be as productive as possible throughout the year.

Motivation

Possibly the key element to productivity in the workforce is also the simplest to define: motivation. This elusive quality is to be found in businesses with a strong regard for employee welfare and a high level of remuneration for their staff. That said, it’s not just rewards, perks, and care that your staff responds to – you can also motivate your staff through the use of deadlines, targets, and ‘of the month’ rewards that recognize their hard work each month.

By motivating your employees, you’re giving them incentives to work as hard as they can for you, which, of course, boosts your productivity. Whether you use the stick, the carrot, or a combination of the two, you need to be able to show your staff that their hard work will lead to pay-offs for them down the line – in the form of a bonus, pay rise, staff rewards, or a promotion.

Collaboration

Another factor of a productive workforce is its ability to easily collaborate across time and space. Even in the traditional office – that is, outside of the remote working norm that’s settled since COVID-19 – it can be difficult to collaborate. You leave a sticky note on a colleague’s desk, and they reply to it in a week’s time. You send out emails to staff members, and they get lost in inboxes across your organization.

The confusion, delay, and dithering lead many businesses towards unproductive practices. By wasting time and energy attempting to collaborate – and failing – teams can lose many hours and feel demotivated as a result. To counter this, and to foster collaboration within your organization, you should install a reliable communications system for all of your staff to use. Check out what Code Software offers and begin taking advantage of the technologies that help teams collaborate – even when working remotely.

Equipment

A bad workman always blames their tools – and, though this saying is often said in jest, there’s certainly a point to it. If you’re using computers that are a decade old, for instance, it’s completely understandable that your files will take longer to load, your computers will freeze from time to time, and some may break with precious unsaved work going down with them. The same can be said of all the equipment that your company uses in order to facilitate the effective and efficient work you demand from your staff.

With this in mind, it’s worth taking a sweeping overview of all of your equipment – both hardware and software – to discover where you might be able to install new devices or new programs to help drive productivity in your workforce. Listen to your staff, too: if they’re frustrated with their equipment, they’ll be producing poorer work for your company.

Drive Automation

Speaking of software, there are giant leaps and bounds out there for businesses that are keen to modernize and automate many of their essential business processes. With digitization fully underway, and with many businesses operating a website and an app, as well as social media channels and business software, this is the time to look into the growing and developing market that’s promising to cut down the labor performed within your business each week.

The key to marrying automation with the maintenance of your workforce is to automate only the most menial and dull tasks. Think about where your staff is plodding through their days, filling in digital order sheets, sending emails, or filing important documents. These processes can all be performed, nearly instantly, with software – so you should automate in order to drive productivity in the tasks that are completed by your workforce.

Reorganization

Finally, you also need to think about how allocation can affect productivity. If employees are poorly deployed, and their key skills and knowledge aren’t being utilized, you’ll be missing out on the quality of the work they may be able to produce. As a manager, one of your key responsibilities is to ensure you’re getting the best from your staff each week – and that often means organizing them into appropriate roles.

This process often begins in meetings – one-to-ones in which you hear the concerns, aspirations, and ambitions of your staff members. From these meetings, you’ll be able to determine who you ought to move into new positions in order to accommodate for the diverse skills that you’re lucky to call part of your overall workforce. Redeploy your staff in more productive roles in order to boost your overall output when working with a team of dedicated employees.

There you have it: six of the most important ways in which you can motivate your staff to be at their most productive every day.