How to boost employee productivity in your company

What are some simple ways to boost employee productivity?

Often, whether a business grows and thrives is highly dependent on whether its employees perform at their peak levels of productivity. Unfortunately, in far too many workplaces, employees spend a significant portion of their days unproductively.

In fact, according to a recent study, office workers are productive for less than three hours per day. As a result, it’s important for business leaders to look for ways to increase employee productivity in the workplace.

Below, we’ll highlight a few simple ways you can begin to increase productivity within your workplace.

Seek employee feedback

One of the best things you can do is seek feedback from your employees. As a manager, you may not be aware of the day-to-day challenges that your employees are facing. If this is the case, it’s hard to implement the best solutions as you don’t know the exact problems.

Make it a priority to empower the voice of employees within your organization. One simple way you can do this is by sending out a survey to your employees. Ask them questions about the challenges they are facing and what suggestions they have for improvement. Then, after you collect enough data from all your employees, you can analyze it to see if there are any patterns. From there, you can implement solutions based directly on the feedback of your employees.

Implement the right tools

These days, there are many technology tools designed to improve productivity within workplaces. However, not all of these tools are right for your business. It’s important that you implement tools that solve specific problems for you, as implementing the wrong tools can just result in even worse productivity.

For example, if a software development company uses Jira to improve its process for tracking software bugs and sharing them among team members, they can choose to use a Jira Slack integration, allowing them to instantly connect two of their previous tools.

Your business can easily do the same thing. Spend time seeing where your business losses most of its productivity, then explore what tools exist that can help you.

Outsource simple tasks

Reducing your team’s workload is a great way to boost productivity. If your team has fewer tasks to complete, they will be able to devote more of their time to the tasks that are truly important. To reduce the workload of your team, you should consider outsourcing some of your simpler tasks.

For example, one area you could outsource is your customer service. If your sales staff doesn’t have to spend as much time helping previous clients, they can instead focus on bringing in new ones. You could also outsource some of your HR tasks, like payroll, allowing your HR team to focus more on recruiting people to your team.

Using your employee feedback, see which tasks your team currently spends the most time on. Then decide if this is the best use of their time or if they would be better off if you moved those tasks elsewhere.

Create a communication plan

A communication plan is a document that details where, when, and how your team should communicate. For example, a communication plan may say that there are meetings every Monday morning to provide project updates, that all quick messages should go through Slack and that all help requests should be submitted via email. It also lists the contact information for each person and their responsibilities.

By formally outlining how your team should communicate, you remove the need for your employees to guess. This reduces the number of time-wasting communications and ensures that all communications go to the right people.

When you consider the fact that the average employee is interrupted every three minutes, the more time-wasting communications you can remove, the better. Plan out how your team should communicate with each other, with you, and with your clients, then type it all up in a document and share it with the team.

Small changes can have a big impact

To improve productivity around your workplace you often don’t need to make drastic changes. Instead, if you can just tweak a few small things, you’ll likely notice that things start to improve. For example, you could implement a new communication tool or simply cut back on the number of meetings you hold.

Try implementing some of the suggestions above, then analyze your results. Keep making adjustments until you reach your desired productivity levels. If you go about this in a systematic way, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t see improvements throughout your business before long.