6 Tips On How To Increase Employee Productivity

Once you started your company and employ the right people, the next thing is to manage their productivity. This might be one of the most important things in one company just because no matter how good a product you offer on the market, the cost of ignoring productivity issues can be major. Company culture can also be affected by low productivity employees that can harm your business in the long run.

A recent study shows that only about 34% of the U.S workforce feels engaged which is about $605 billion each year in lost productivity. The question is why are the other 66% feel non-productive which can be a devastating factor and can run your business to the ground. Since this resembles a big issue that decisionmakers should handle we decided to write some tips about how to increase employee productivity.

1. Make sure your employees have the right tools

This is a big factor in determining the productivity of the team. If you don’t hand your employees the right tools, they would not be able to deliver the right results. You should make sure that you maximize the usage of their skills with all the right software and hardware solutions. It is best to arrange meetings when you can ask what your employees need in order to deliver the results you demand.

2. Increase productivity with better recruiting

Of course, this is one of the most obvious steps to take, but the right and affordable workforce might not always be available for you. If you build your team with high-energy employees that work hard in order to succeed, you will not have any issues with productivity. However, as we mentioned sometimes those people are hard to come by or you cannot afford them.

That is why you should build your team strategically and if you employ people with lower energy or passion, make sure you spend some time on them and train them to adapt to the company’s culture. Take into consideration watching the movie Moneyball, that shows the story of how Billy Beanie made the Oakland Athletics a competitive team, going against baseball expert picks that deemed it as impossible.

Besides their financial struggles, Beanie was able to recruit an affordable team, that was able to execute the tasks necessary for the team to succeed. He used statistical analysis, which is something you can use to measure the productivity of your employees.

3. Improve employee skills

This is one of the methods that many companies try to follow. Investing in your employees is one of the things that every company must go through in order to have a better future. Think about it, if you invest in the skills of your employees the work will be done more efficiently and the quality will be improved. There is always a chance that you might lose some employees that you invested in, but you cannot think like that.

4. Micromanaging

Some companies have trouble with giving the employees too much work that they cannot deliver or they deliver with less quality. You will always get better results if you manage the workflow in your company and evenly divide tasks for each employer by making sure that they can handle it. Another thing is micro-managing which is a well-known strategy that is proven over the years. This strategy applies to the managers, saying that they should back off a little bit from the employees in order to improve productivity. Employees tend to get nervous and perform poorly when their managers are around. That is why this process is activated, enabling the employees to manage with their own work, as for the managers they will only control the results and intervene if needed.

5. Communication

Communication is key in order to increase productivity. Large companies always want to improve their communication channels in order to avoid misunderstandings. Even small companies can improve productivity by developing a simple chain of communication between all the levels in the company.

The communication chain between employees must be clear and simple. Avoid complicated connections that will confuse the employees which will result in productivity loss.

6. Employee care

Stress is a major factor in lowering productivity on employees. The number of employees calling in sick to work due to stress tripled between 1996-2000. That is why your company must care for your employees and give them the freedom that they need. Create a stress-free environment that will boost the productivity and award your hard-working employees with a day-off or small vacation. This might seem like a bad thing to do, but it will pay off in the long run as the employees will be more productive and happy at work.

Productivity is a major factor in every company, that is why you have to find a way to increase it. High-productive companies have fewer problems, lower costs, and good company climate. These are some of the basic rules to follow if you want to increase the productivity of your employees, but you have to do your research and find out what your employees need in order to succeed.