A productive workplace is a profitable one, a point not lost on managers striving to compete in a tough and increasingly global economy. If your employees are not efficient, then you’ll lose money. Worse, your business might no longer be effective and it could be faced with closing shop.
Here’s what you can do to help raise employee productivity:
Empower to the People
Your best workers should be unleashed, allowed to make certain decisions without input from you. This can include handling and expediting customer complaints, ordering product, even setting their own hours.
By empowering your people you motivate them. Motivated people work harder than people that are not empowered or who feel demoralized because you aren’t entrusting them to handle certain tasks. Get past the control and release certain responsibilities while training your people to take on additional tasks that you usually perform.
Reward Beyond Compensation
Your employees work because they get paid. They also work because you provide benefits. But neither matter as much to some people as do the rewards that go beyond compensation.
People value recognition and for some folk it is what gets them going each morning and sustains them throughout their day, even throughout their career. You can give employees a boost by recognizing your key players through an “employee of the month” program. Here, you would announce the winner at a meeting of your workers, provide a certificate, and add their name to a plaque. You can also provide a token of your appreciation such as a gift certificate to a restaurant or a favorite retailer.
Encourage Team Work
If your employees work well together, then productivity will benefit. But if your house is divided it will fall. Or at least its foundation won’t be a sure one.
Team work starts when you begin to assemble your team. Hire people that are only a good fit for your company and demonstrate that they work well with others. You can encourage team work by providing meaningful events such as pizza parties on the first Friday of the month, a company picnic, or bringing in a favorite entertainer.
Cross Train Your Staff
Mix things up at work by having your team handle each other’s jobs. Cross training breaks up the monotony and also equips your people with new, transferrable skills.
If a complete switch of jobs is not possible or feasible, consider temporary switches such as one afternoon per week. Have Betty greet customers and Robert answer the phone, reversing their customary responsibilities. Both employees will feel energized and gain valuable experience in the process.
Be a Manager of Action
You cannot avoid all meetings at all costs, but you can limit the number of meetings and length. When you hold a meeting, stick to an agenda and end it on time.
Become known as a manager of productivity, one who values his workers by getting the work done instead of talking about it. Impromptu meetings with a small group of people and kept short may be of more value than the standard meeting option.
Create Realistic Targets
Managers that are unrealistic set targets that simply are not achievable. What that does is add pressure to the workplace and employee enthusiasm sinks. Better to create and achieve realistic targets than to come up with a “pie in the sky” goal that is unattainable.
You can quantify what targets you want to have met and outline that goal for your team. Provide a strategy for meeting the target and interim feedback including weekly and monthly reports to demonstrate progress.
Melanie Hickman is a professional blogger that shares the latest information on software and applications that can help your business improve performance and productivity. She writes for Ecount Inc., which provides an ERP software that offers easy setup and customization capabilities.
