Any effective and successful business understands the importance of workplace productivity and continually
Productive workplaces are built on teamwork and a clear shared vision to where a business is heading.
There is a willingness at all levels to increase capacity and invest in new skills. In a productive workplace, the employees’ opinion and roles are valued as well as sharing of ideas is encouraged.
Productivity equals output over time ( P = O / T ), therefore, to increase productivity we need either to increase output or decrease the time it takes to achieve completed tasks, or, perform a combination of the
two.
So, how can workplace productivity be improved?
1- Set Clearly Defined Goals
Employees should not be expected to be efficient if their goals are not clearly defined, achievable, and measurable. This will lead to an unproductive workforce. Therefore, it is imperative that you define their responsibilities, set priorities, and ensure your team has the capacity to execute them.
2- Clarify Roles and Responsibilities
Next, ensure the employees’ assignments are clear and unambiguous. Precisely communicate the expectations of the organization. Identify the top three high-priority tasks for their attention. Estimate the time allocated for these tasks. Utilize automated workflow software for execution, especially if the work from other employees in your organization depends on your services.
3- Give and Receive Feedback
The term ‘feedback’ is utilized to describe constructive criticism from one individual, communicated to another individual (or a group), for the purpose of improving current and future actions and behaviors. Feedback that is constructive is vital to the employee’s ongoing growth and development. Feedback clarifies expectations, helps the employee to learn from their mistakes and builds confidence. Effective feedback, both positive and negative, assists in providing valuable information utilized for important decision-making. Top performing companies are where they are because they consistently search for the means to improve on Best Practice. On the observance of poor behaviour or an event, feedback should be swift and specific and not delayed for weeks, or until the employee’s performance appraisal. HubnSub software is your solution. with an effective feature for employee feedback.
4- Avoid One of the Biggest Productivity Killers
Proven fact … Distractions are one of the biggest productivity killers, within which clutter has the most
dangerous effect on employees’ productivity.
Clutter: a cluttered workspace results in a cluttered mind. And as Lifehacker pointed out, your brain also has a proclivity to bounce around when things get tough. The more challenging the task, the more likely your mind is to wander.
Of course, you can try to make your mind quiet and focus, either by exercising self-control (difficult) or, by eliminating distracting elements from your work environment (much easier). Better to clean your workspace by removing those papers and files that are causing the clutter. Contain all your digitalized work in an automated platform system.
5- Communicate Effectively for Productivity Enhancement
All managers know that communication is the key to a productive workforce. Without effective, two-way communication, businesses fail. Unfortunately, many employees, especially in the Middle East, use email to communicate with each other. Several studies have discovered that emails can occupy nearly 28% of an employee’s time. In fact, the results revealed that email was the second most time-consuming activity for workers affecting employees’ productivity. Managers who effectively communicate clearly-defined roles and responsibilities will have an engaged, productive workforce. To ensure efficiency in the workplace, a single communication system will enhance productivity and save time. Research has shown that almost half of the workforce in the United States prefers online communication with colleagues resulting in increased productivity. Our workflow management system will result in effective communication and improvement in productivity.
6- Don’t Let Meetings Destroy Your Productivity
Meetings are time killers. First, most meetings are completely unnecessary, and many could be replaced with a workflow system. To make things worse, most meetings are scheduled for an hour by default, although the agenda could be completed in twenty minutes. This encourages a wastage of time and opportunity costs. On the other hand, lengthy meetings are unproductive; actual work is detained. Nonetheless, meetings are required for information sharing and decision-making, therefore, endeavour to invite only those team members who are actively involved in the issues, remain goal-oriented with the agenda and summarize every meeting with clear resolutions. Our workflow management system will gradually decrease your excess numbers of meetings.
7- Be More Productive While Working Remotely in the Comfort of your Home
Working remotely in the comfort of your home is gathering momentum. From 2012 to 2016, Gallup reports that the number of employees working remotely jumped from 39% to 43%.
Employees working from home might appear inefficient. However, the reality is quite the opposite. Studies demonstrate that people who work from home are 13% more productive than their office counterparts. Allowing your employees to telecommunicate saves time that would otherwise be completely wasted.
For example,
If an employee feels too ill to come into work or has an unresolved issue, they can still be productive. If not allowed to work from home, they may be forced to take a sick day and skip work altogether. This is simply not efficient. Instead, allow your employee to work at home while maximizing their availability, and at the same time, maintain management control by utilizing a cloud system to assist you by being in communication with them to provide supervision and/or follow up while they perform their task.
Furthermore, when your employees are scattered in different locations, confusion reigns as to where project data is located, who is performing which task, and how much work is remaining. Having an accessible cloud system tool, allows your team to be free from hours of meetings and copious email correspondence. A digital transformation platform like HubnSub can help you coordinate all activities in one, easy-to-manage, web-based tool.
8- Remove unproductive tasks
Streamlining workload allows employees to concentrate on high-priority assignments and increasing productivity.
For example, a Supervisor’s daily report is time-consuming to complete, while at the same time, Supervisors sometimes are too busy to read them. In fact, valuable time could be used more efficiently for effective goal-accomplishment that actually moves your company forward. Why not utilize a business collaboration platform that assists teams and organizations to become lean, meanwhile, allowing Supervisors to observe employee’s practice.
9- Measurement Means Management
Productivity is difficult to measure. Lumen In control management defines productivity as “a measure of how efficiently a process runs and how effectively it uses resources”. This is achieved by monitoring, streamlining, measuring, analyzing and managing projects across the entire organization. In today’s business environment, HubnSub offers a user-friendly, much-need automated measuring tool to perform these functions.
10- … and never stop!
Productivity is never an accident. In order to increase productivity in the workplace, it is a requirement to constantly monitor your company’s workflow, output and employees’ performance measurements. And never stop.
Start a free trial NOW with HubnSub, the first business collaboration platform in Egypt and the Middle East to simplify your work processes, boost team performance and productivity, improve team communication, and exceed customer satisfaction.