Want your employees to complete tasks accurately without wasting time or rectifying avoidable mistakes? Explore 15 ways to increase employee productivity quickly in your organization.
Employee productivity is the rate of valuable work an employee completes in a given time frame. Being productive involves completing tasks accurately without consuming extra time or rectifying avoidable mistakes.
You'll be surprised that the average employee is productive for less than 3 hours daily. Moreover, research suggests that it takes employees more than 23 minutes to return their attention to their tasks once they lose focus. Imagine the impact this has on your business!
How do you ensure employees operate at peak productivity in your organization?
Here are 15 ways to increase employee productivity
1. Ensure clarity in vision, goals, and game plan
To perform well, one must know what they’re doing and why. Unfortunately, 72% of employees need help understanding their company's objectives and goals, which leads them to underperform. The problem starts at the outset, with 88% of employees stating their employer didn't clearly explain these during onboarding. To fix this:
- Explain and clarify your company's goals and objectives.
- Ensure important company information is disseminated regularly. An employee communication app can help ensure everyone’s on the same page.
- Build a culture where employees feel connected with goals and objectives.
2. Focus on transformational leadership
As a leader, you need to lead employees toward productivity. Following autocratic leadership styles is known to impact productivity negatively. Instead, implementing transformational leadership unfolds discipline and freedom, which boosts productivity. To put this into practice,
- Be assertive with your employees regarding work, and follow a democratic, transactional, and disruptive leadership style.
- Simultaneously, present a humanized version of yourself to build a connection, for example, by sharing your experiences.
- Aim at leading by example with your actions.
- Ensure you’re proactive regarding employee issues and address them head-on.
3. Invest in building employee competency
Increase in employee competency can increase employee work productivity by 80%. Building this is totally in your interest, and here’s how to do it:
- Identify areas where employees under-perform and develop a list of skills-oriented training programs to fill the gaps.
- Work on building proximal skills (skills essential to your organization) and distal skills (skills that are helpful but not urgent) among your employees.
- Incentivize gaining competence by introducing gamification. For example, set up mechanisms for employees to achieve "levels" they can flaunt among other employees on your app.
4. Establish a flexible working schedule
Working hours also impact employee productivity. The longer employees work at a stretch, the less productive they get. Moreover, not controlling working hours destabilizes individuals, leading to poor performance and reduced productivity. To avoid this,
- Make flexible working patterns and schedules a part of your organizational culture.
- Encourage employees to complete assigned work within deadlines but according to a timetable that works for them.
- Don’t penalize your in-office or frontline workers for taking breaks during work as long as they complete their tasks.
- Track logged-in hours and attendance metrics to identify if any employee is abusing the flexible working model. Your employee engagement platform can be a helpful place to get clues.
5. Help employees maintain work-life balance
Loved ones are essential in every individual’s life and family well-being is key to the work-life balance puzzle. Yet, you must recognize that family motivation is a double-edged sword that can enhance and debilitate productivity, especially if family pressures are too high. Recognizing employees' unique family needs and requirements can help you customize solutions that keep them tethered to your organization while ensuring adequate work-life balance. For this,
- Encourage smart working approaches so employees spend optimum time at work and with their families. Smart working strategies include chunking tasks, delegating responsibilities, automating manual tasks, etc.
- Pay special attention to female employees, as research shows that pressure related to family issues is more pressing for them & significantly disrupts work-life balance.
- Conduct one-to-one conversations privately to understand unique family-oriented stressors among your employees. Take realistic actions to help if the problem comes under the purview of organizational processes.
6. Avoid micromanaging
Micromanaging may seem practical, especially when engaging in individualized instruction. However, it often demoralizes employees and fosters resentment. It mentally impacts individuals and brings down their productivity. To avoid this,
- Allow your employees to exercise their agency. Let them set measurable goals and track their progress themselves. A productivity management app can help you implement this and ensure accountability.
- Empower your employees to speak out. If they have valuable ideas, incorporate them into your process. This way, employees feel their views are respected instead of having to follow every minute order, which can feel like microaggression.
7. Address conflicting dynamics
Conflict in the workplace is commonplace. When different people work together, disagreements, competitiveness, and a tendency to rival one another are a natural by-product. However, conflict beyond a certain limit affects the work environment and leads to productivity loss. To avoid this, you must build a cohesive work culture based on mutual help-seeking and assistance. For this:
- Communicate directly with employees regarding the downsides of being overly competitive and conflict-prone.
- Teach conflict resolution skills to your employees.
- Allow people to express themselves on engagement apps as long as they are respectful and considerate to one another. This can help resolve conflicts. Assigning moderators may also help here.
8. Reinforce positive behavior
Dwelling on weaknesses and shortcomings demoralizes employees. Instead, focusing on an individual's positive traits and achievements encourages their strengths, such as motivation, ambition, and goal-oriented behavior. This positively impacts their output, and 72% of employees are willing to work harder when recognized and validated. For this,
- Maintain attendance systems with machine learning capabilities so that you can reward those who use their schedules optimally. The insights will help you understand who’s utilizing their time best and encourage others to follow their example.
- Incentivize participation in CSR activities so employees feel they're doing something worthwhile.
- Channelize your employees' entrepreneurial intentions to foster innovative approaches instead of feeling threatened by their plans.
9. Regularly monitor job satisfaction
Employees are productive only when they’re satisfied. Dissatisfied individuals may passive-aggressively work less, evade responsibilities, and even think about switching jobs. Monitoring job satisfaction regularly helps identify concerning signs and take corrective actions. Here's what to do in that respect:
- Collect feedback regarding ways to improve job satisfaction and take observable action.
- Eliminate processes, systems, and hurdles that hamper job satisfaction. Example: Giving your employees cleaner spaces to work from, ensuring employee self-service.
- Ensure psychological and physical safety by making your workplace more accessible and inclusive.
- Implement DEI and work-from-home policies. These can make your employees feel accepted and more in control of their lives, leading to job satisfaction.
10. Focus on employee health
Poor physical and mental health are directly linked to lowered productivity. Not only does poor health lead to absenteeism, but it also reduces your employees' performance quality. Moreover, chronic fatigue, often caused by stress, physical and mental health issues, and being overburdened, disrupts employee well-being and hurts productivity. Researchers recommend doing the following:
- Take actionable measures such as implementing a financially incentivized health management program. Insurance plans help reassure employees too.
- Run health awareness campaigns and conduct screening programs for severe illnesses like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.
- Prioritize mental health and provide onsite and online counselors so your employees can discuss their emotional problems.
- Implement fitness and meditation classes to help employees beat chronic fatigue.
- Make provisions for a mental health day so employees can take a day off when they feel tired to rejuvenate and relax, no questions asked.
11. Establish effective communication strategies
Effective communication is essential to ensure the right message gets to the right people at the right time. Lack of clear, consistent communication and misinterpretations lead to productivity loss and employee disengagement. To counter this:
- Use technology to implement seamless communication. For example, implement an employee app for all internal communications and follow it as a single source of truth.
- Ensure two-way communication is available on all your employees' platforms, such as email, telephone, text, and mobile apps.
- Attend to the communication needs of both in-office and frontline workforce by creating parallel and targeted communication campaigns. For example, asynchronous communication campaigns, which allow delayed responses, work best among frontline workers. Similarly, focus on mobile-first tech for the frontline workforce.
12. Foster healthy relationships and friendships
Lately, there has been a cultural shift toward making the workplace more professional and organized. However, this has resulted in a need for more opportunities to make friends at work and build valuable relationships. Making friends at work is a universal phenomenon that has existed since immemorial, enhancing productivity. Bring it back again by:
- Including social features on your employee engagement app so people can text each other privately or share status updates.
- Conducting in-person events and get-togethers so your on-site and frontline workers can physically meet and unwind.
- Highlighting the importance of building valuable relationships at work through your communication campaigns.
13. Ensure your employees are well-paid
Although this is obvious-sounding, it deserves a mention. If you don’t care for your employees' financial well-being, their productivity will take a nose-dive. Interestingly, this phenomenon is more pronounced among male employees than among females. Here's what you can do to ensure employees are well compensated and feel so too:
- Explore if your employees are satisfied with the remuneration they receive through in-depth surveys and feedback collection.
- Implement strategies to improve financial well-being among employees through financial literacy campaigns and investment training at work.
- Regularly share material that helps employees save and invest more to build wealth. You can distribute these resources for easy access on your employee app.
14. Leverage technology
With widespread digital transformation, there are now several tools (many freely available) that help with enhancing employee productivity. Encourage their usage to simplify workflows, reduce redundant tasks, and boost productivity. Here are some examples:
- Note-taking: EverNote, Notion, and Simplenote are excellent apps that allow your employees to jot down essential points they may need later.
- Task Management: While Asana and ClickUp help manage tasks
- Content creation: Grammarly, ChatGPT, and Canva to write emails, create templates and presentations, and conduct research.
- Productivity tools to keep calm: HeadSpace, Calm, and Buddhify are excellent meditation apps that help your staff meditate during working hours. This helps enhance productivity, too.
- Specialized employee engagement apps, such as Speakap, to enhance communication specific to your organizational needs and integrate different processes for in-office and frontline workers.
15. Track productivity metrics
Finally, tracking how your employees perform regularly is necessary to ascertain where they’re at and which areas require creative and customized solutions to boost productivity. To that end, here are some metrics to track:
- Planned-to-done mapping helps you ascertain how well plans are implemented. Based on the results, you can take the necessary action.
- Customer satisfaction indirectly tells you a lot about your employees' productivity. A surge in customer complaints, churn rate, or poor feedback indicates it's time to revisit employee performance and productivity.
- Revenue-per-employee helps quantify your employees’ productivity around your organizational revenue. If you see your revenue-per-employee metric falling, it is time to take action.
- Workforce analytics in engagement apps also help you measure and compare team performance.
To foster employee productivity - provide them the ammunition
While the above-outlined strategies can boost productivity, proper implementation is critical. This is where the role of tools comes in. 46% of employees feel digital tools make them more productive. As a decision maker, choose a tool that helps you simplify work, build valuable relationships, and gather insights to navigate improved employee performance.
When using tools, here are some of the features you need to look for:
- Mobile-enabled so both deskless and frontline workers can use it for seamless communication.
- Creation and distribution of individualized, curated, and targeted content. You can use this to train, communicate, create awareness, and boost productivity directly.
- Tracking employee journeys to ensure that your communication reflects the career stage of your employees.
- Integration with other apps and third-party tools such as task-management apps, ERP systems, and so on to customize and provide the best solutions for your employees to be productive.