Your employees are your company’s greatest assets. When you have great people, you can achieve big things. Investing in the right staff can pay in terms of profitability… but that can quickly come undone if your work and your work practices are unproductive.

 

The bottom line is, that if you hire employees, they need to produce value for your company that is greater than the cost of their salaries.

 

When employees are productive, it leads to an increase in revenue. Productive staff members spend the same amount of time or less on a task as lazy staff members. And they do it better! Productive people contribute to increased levels of morale among their colleagues: people can find it extremely demotivating if they are working with others who aren’t doing their fair share of work. High levels of morale, in turn, help you to attract and keep good workers.

 

Staff can be unproductive for many reasons, and it isn’t just through laziness. They may be working with poor systems, that affect their work. In the worst scenario, bad workplaces with bad leadership and a toxic culture can also have a bad impact on productivity.

 

To determine if you have a productive workplace, you need to assess whether your staff is efficient. You achieve this by examining your staff’s total output over a specified time. How this looks will vary depending on the nature of your business.

 

If you find that your levels of workplace productivity could do with an overhaul, there are some measures you can put in place to make improvements.

 

1. Properly train your employees

 

Sometimes in some works, people learn the job from colleagues that also did the same. Unfortunately, their colleagues may not be doing the tasks in the best way and maybe teaching poor work practices to their peers. Their processes might involve unnecessary steps and other inefficiencies.

 

Inconsistencies in the way work is carried out can lead to mistakes being made which can, in turn, have a range of consequences. This can include work having to be re-done to fix errors, through to reputational and legal damage.

 

Mapping out the best, most efficient processes and training employees to work this way can ensure consistency across the board every time a new employee commences.

 

Similarly, when you have a policy and procedure changes, delivering appropriate training to all affected employees will ensure they are working efficiently and effectively.

 

2. Ensure your employees have the tools they need

 

Your employees can’t be expected to work at their peak if they don’t have the right equipment and tools to do their jobs effectively. This can include the right software as well as hardware and other specialist equipment.

 

Sharing resources can lead to inefficiencies as well: Do you have one printer, for example, among 100 employees? Do they have to regularly wait to use it? Is this the best use of their time?

 

3. Invest in productivity-boosting apps, Your company’s greatest assets.

 

There is a range of innovative apps designed to make information sharing easier across the enterprise. These are designed to foster teamwork and simplify the work. 

 

They also allow your team to share ideas and work together. When the staff work in “silos” they may be trying to solve similar problems, without knowing that other person may have already found the solution.

 

4. Improve communication across the organization, Your company’s greatest assets.

 

Effective internal communications are necessary to have a productive workplace. 

 

Policies, procedures, and protocols rely on robust internal communications practices to be implemented effectively.

 

A mass notification software tool like DeskAlerts can help to improve communications in your enterprise. It sends messages straight to desktops and it’s best than email. Email has become untrusty as a communication tool as so many messages are sent every day that they are easy to miss when people are busy.

 

The open rate for internal emails in your company, if it is like most other companies, will be around 30 or 40 percent. And that’s a good result for email. With DeskAlerts, the open rate is never less than 90 percent.

 

5. Reduce distractions in the workplace, Your company’s greatest assets.

 

 When employees are distracted it stands to reason they’re going to be less productive. In the modern workplace, these distractions can take the form of internet and social media use. 

 

If these are causing issues for productivity within your organization, consider implementing policies where employees are unable to look at their phones during work time, for example, and can only use their devices on their breaks.

 

6. Encourage your employees to be more autonomous, Your company’s greatest assets.

 

It might seem counter-intuitive, but when you micromanage your employees and dictate their every move, it can have the opposite effect to what you may intend.

 

People don’t react well to this sort of work environment and can become resentful and want to leave because they feel as though they aren’t trusted. This can also stop creative problem-solving. 

 

7. Gather employee feedback to make workplace improvements

 

Your employees are on the coal face of your organization and understand better than anyone what happens on a day-to-day basis performing various tasks across different areas of the business.

 

They will often have points of frustration about processes that take too long and may even have suggestions and ideas about driving improvements so that work processes are streamlined and more efficient.

 

You can ask your employees for feedback in a variety of ways, from surveying them anonymously, inviting them to talk face-to-face in focus groups, forming working committees, or even having something as simple as an “ideas box” in a common area where they can submit suggestions.

 

 

Time_management: How to measure productivity, example one: measuring time management

 

This method of productivity measurement determines how productive your employees are by recording how their work time is spent.

 

This form of measurement helps you to determine how long particular tasks take, which tasks they spend the most time on, how long is spent on non-work related activities, how long they take breaks for and how many days are lost due to illness and other absences.

 

You can use this measurement technique to determine inefficiencies in your processes and procedures and make adjustments and set goals to reduce wasted time in the future.

 

Workplace_productivity statistics: How to measure productivity, example two: quantitative measurement.

 

Quantitative measurement of productivity examines your employees’ output over a specified time, for example per hour, per day, or month.

 

So, for example, a manufacturing business may measure how many items they produce and how long it takes to make each item over a set period and what the financial value of those products is.

 

Then you can add up how much it costs you in terms of employee labor to create those products – factoring in things that the employee is not responsible for such as outages, supplier delays, equipment breakdowns, the time needed for training, and so on.

 

This will let you determine whether you are getting value for money or whether you need to make improvements.