How can you help your employees to work better and faster? Productivity is a critical aspect of any business, and you can improve it with time management and goal setting strategies. From the long-term perspective, the best way to save money and time is by improving the productivity level of your business workforce.
A big part of productivity is about teaching employees to be more accountable when doing their work. Luckily, today’s technology helps businesses improve productivity by putting the following into practice:
- Focus on Time Management
Before caring about results, make sure that your workers are aware of how they are spending their time. There is a simple weekly exercise to measure the level of focus on a task.
For the next week, document what you have been doing every 30 minutes. At the end of the week, categorize those chunks and identify which ones are essential for your development and what is a distraction. Find ways to eliminate workplace distractions to get a higher productivity rate next week.
- Setting Deadlines
Tight deadlines work fabulously 90% of the time to motivate the team. However, some activities are working habits that don’t really have deadlines. How can we improve productivity here?
The key is fragmenting the bigger goals into daily objectives with mini-deadlines. To-do lists work to give your day a purpose and to help you feel successful. With this in mind, consider having your employees use Evernote to organize notes better. A central hub for saving, accessing, and tracking information helps your team streamline their collaborative efforts, consequently improving productivity in the process.
- Optimize their work environment
Most people believe that discipline helps you to work harder. What few entrepreneurs know is that most of our thoughts depend on our emotions, which depend on our environment.
Two quick ways to optimize the working space is to remove distractions and design it to make employees happier.
If distractions are inaccessible, people will stop thinking of them, is more likely to work better. Also, your employees will feel more inspired and happy if the environment has the right lighting, noise level, and temperature.
- Sense of urgency and purpose
Sometimes, distractions are not there to make the worker unproductive. Mind that the employee must have a natural disposition to work to improve productivity.
You should talk to your employees periodically to understand their concerns. Is there a problem that they don’t know how to solve? Are they aware of the company’s purpose? Do they realize the impact of their work? Communication solves team problems.
- Taking Breaks
If you look at the most productive people on the planet, they tend to distribute their energy smartly to be more consistent. Once your team manages to work hard all the time, it is good to learn where to stop to prevent burnout.
If you want to work hard and smart, reduce the length of the working sessions, increasing the frequency. Intelligent breaks will help your workers to preserve their energy and get things done every day.
Final Thoughts
Entrepreneurs think of productivity as doing more stuff, but you may want to avoid finishing all your work on the same day. If you reserve the most interesting task for the next day, you will come back feeling more engaged.
Finally, remember that being productive is a personal choice. There is a limit of changes that you can make, but other aspects depend on the employee. These facts could be lack of sleep, health, personal events, among others.
A compelling company vision can encourage employees to be more productive at work and personal lives.
