Did you know, according to the 70% rule, employees aren’t most productive when they work as hard as they can every day, but when they work at a less intense pace most of the time? There are many other tricks large corporations use to increase productivity.
So why should your small business be any different? As a leader, it’s time you worked with your team to figure out where your company stands and what you can do to better your company’s productivity.
Here are 7 tips for boosting business productivity that you can start applying right away.
1. Review Company and Employee Goals Regularly
The only way employees are going to know if they are being productive in the right way is if they have something to measure themselves against. This means that you need to give your employees very strict criteria on what they need to accomplish and what their project goals are.
Set these goals at the beginning of every quarter and review them weekly or biweekly. This way you can know instantly if your employees and business are falling off the wagon and you can course-correct right away. You don’t have to wait until the end of the year to figure out that your business productivity was off-kilter the whole time.
2. Minimize Time Wasters
Many time wasters pervade and dismantle company productivity. Let’s go into detail with a couple of them.
Meetings
Who hasn’t sat through a boring, useless meeting and thought to themselves that this could have been an email? Hundreds of employees have sat through countless meetings, wasting their precious time that could have been spent doing something productive. Do not let this happen to your employees.
Make sure you have a strict agenda and goal for each meeting and do not allow the meeting to go off on tangents. If anything else needs to be discussed that’s not on the agenda, set up another meeting for it. Try to keep meetings between 15 and 30 minutes long.
This is another tech that is supposed to save time but has turned into a time suck instead. Too many folks use the ease of email as an excuse to become lazy with their communication.
Sometimes it’s easier and more productive to just get up off your seat and talk to your colleague face-to-face about your projects. There are many other email etiquettes you need to follow.
3. Use Productivity Apps
Dozens of great productivity apps are available on the market to help you schedule your employees and teams better. Some of them are:
- Todoist
- Evernote
- Asana
- Slack
- Google Docs
- Dropbox
Figure out what productivity apps work for your team and then use them diligently. Do not let them become a distraction, though.
4. Check Metrics to Measure Progress
CEOs and other business leaders use these metrics and many others to measure progress, that is, whether productivity is going up, staying stagnant, or sliding backward.
Follow this wise adage: What you don’t measure, doesn’t improve.
That’s why every single time you try to improve business productivity, make sure you measure the numbers before and after. This way you know if your efforts are garnering fruit, or if they are just wasting all your employees’ time.
This doesn’t mean that every single tactic that you put into practice will bear fruit. Some of them will be a big flop. But when you measure things, you can know this right away and you can change course to try something different sooner rather than later.
5. Offer a Wellness Program
All work and no movement makes an employee dull indeed – this is a twist on the typical saying you’ve heard before. Nevertheless, it’s still true.
There’s a reason why all the major corporations offer their employees some kind of wellness package, either yoga classes in-house, a salad bar in the cafeteria, or an annual gym membership. Every time your employees are active, they are building their mental health, reducing stress, and improving their physical health as well.
All this leads to them becoming more productive in the workplace. These kinds of holistic measures that treat your employee as a whole person, not just a cog in a wheel, are what will boost your business productivity fastest. And with the least amount of effort.
6. Use Incentives and Other Means To Motivate Employees
Incentives, giveaways, or other such measures should only be used in very rare cases. If you use incentives too often, it can result in your employees feeling unmotivated to do work when there are no incentives offered. It can result in a drop in company productivity very fast.
Suffice it to say, incentives can be very useful and can boost productivity very quickly if used in the right way and at the right time. Experiment with your employees to see what works best for them.
7. Offer Remote Work Once or Twice a Week
Do a lot of your employees commute from far and out to get to the office? That can be quite mentally and physically exhausting for them. Why not offer remote work once or twice a week to them so they can eliminate that stressful commute?
That will help them feel more relaxed and refreshed for work and it will boost their productivity for certain. Try it to see how your employees feel about the change. And make it optional so only the employees who wish to work from home do so.
Business Productivity Is Forever Changing
As you might have surmised, business productivity is never steady or stable. It’s always on the move, either up, down, or sideways.
That’s why it’s so important to work on improving productivity using the tips laid out above. It should be an inherent part of your company strategy.
Keep browsing through related articles on business strategy on our website to learn and grow as a business leader.
