Introduction
There may be some days when you couldn’t complete your tasks and assignments. You create a list of things to do, and the same thing happens the next day. Managing your time and maintaining productivity at work is challenging sometimes. Today, we’ll discuss how to improve productivity in the workplace.
According to a survey conducted by Career Builder, 75% of employers say that businesses and companies lose 2 hours of work every day. There are various elements involved in killing the productivity of the team, and it’s difficult to pinpoint at one point. As Peter Drucker Said;
“Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.”
How to Improve Productivity
It’s hard and challenging if you don’t know where to start and how to improve your productivity. It doesn’t matter wherever you’re or whatever your team is, if you follow the below-mentioned suggestions, then you can increase your productivity.
Realistic Goals
First of all, you should create realistic goals for your team at the planning stage. After that, you should sub-divide the goals for the team to execute them. HR Workflow applications or other tools should be in place in order to monitor the progress.
You should avoid assigning a big goal to the team with a limited time frame. If you divide the project and distribute it among the team members, then it would motivate the team members.
Clear Roles
After setting the goals, next you should clearly communicate about their roles and what you expect from them. You should make it clear to them about the work priorities in ascending/descending order.
How much time they’re supposed to spend on each task, and tell them about the quality and result that you’re expecting from them. After providing them all the guidelines, give them time and freedom to finish the work in their way.
Feedback
Many experts suggest a culture of teamwork where you get feedback and constructive criticism regularly for the development of the team. For instance, you can the team and employees whether they require resources, giving them sufficient time to complete the job, and inquiring them about the challenges they’re facing. Some of the following questions you should check in the feedback process are as follows;
- Manageable and Achievable workload
- Uncover the problem yet and the work is making any progress or not
- Relevant objectives
You could also use many tools like Performance Management Software to check the effectiveness of the process and make sure that employees are performing well.
Not Allow Meetings to Disturb
Meetings usually have a negative reputation and image in terms of wasting time and impacting employees’ work and performance. You want to share the decision and information. For this, you should only invite relevant team members, create specific goals, and summarize the meeting in a good way. When arranging meetings like this, and then they would decline.
You should experiment with new types of meetings like walking meetings, etc.
Performance Culture & Layout
You should check whether the layout of your office space is comfortable for the employees to work. Only your team members would answer this question. However, a comfortable working environment helps them to be focused and perform better. It’s your workspace that impacts your productivity at the end of the day. Therefore, you should arrange it however you feel creatively comfortable. If the employees are more engaged, their productivity would increase.
Effective Communication
You can amplify the efficiency of the employees and team members by having one communication system within the organization. Approximately, one-half of the US workforce agrees with this idea and they would like to talk to their colleagues about work online.
Team messenger is a very good communication system tool. It allows team members to easily search out their best solution relevant to their requirements. However, it’s a place where you only communicate with the team about work, instead of being distracted by the chat messages of friends and relatives.
Including Team into the Project
Without any centralized team management system, teamwork could become complicated. Just collaboration software is good if employees are working remotely at distant locations. People could easily become confused. Like who is performing the work, the location of project data, and how far they have come.
You should have a good planning tool that employees could access from anywhere. They shouldn’t be involved in the e-mail correspondence and hours of meeting time. However, Droptask and Basecamp are well easy to use project management software.
Evaluate/How to improve productivity
If you aren’t evaluating the performance of the team, then you can’t make any progress. Therefore, you should keep studying the metrics of your team members. For instance, you can start by checking staff retention ratio, income, sales, productivity, etc.
Your focus should be on the long term and amplifying the internal communication system. You should keep checking the results. If you don’t like it, then change the strategy. If a strategy is working well, then emphasize it a bit more.
Avoid overdoing it
You should avoid too many strategies, tips, and tools. However, the company should bring workers and software under one page and follow the productive workflow pattern. The productivity of the company would slow down without planning.
Keeping Going
Productivity is a never-ending continuous process. If you’re changing strategies like a swinging pendulum, then you’re only wasting your time. If you want to amplify the productivity at the workplace, then you should evaluate your performance and keep going.
Avoid Multitasking
Multitasking may seem interesting that you want to perform various tasks at once. In reality, multitasking doesn’t work. Earl K Miller said that multitasking isn’t possible for human beings. Therefore, you should assign one work to your at once.
Take a Break
If you think that you can get more work done by working long hours; you can’t when you’re exhausted. Many research studies have proven that your productivity would boost up if you take regular breaks. It could be having a coffee in the afternoon, 15 minutes of walk in the office, etc.
Handle Big Tasks when Excited
If you aren’t feeling good, then you shouldn’t deal with big goals. It’s because you’re so exhausted and tired to finish them. It would take a lot more time to finish it than expected. It makes you feel like your productivity has declined.
The point is that you should handle the big project when you’re feeling confident. For instance, if you’re an early bird and a morning person, then you should take the big project early in the morning.
2-Minutes Rule
The 2-minutes rule means that you can start the work within two minutes. It doesn’t mean that you can complete it in less than 120 seconds. However, when you take the first step, then it means you start the journey towards winning it.
Conclusion: How to Increase Productivity
After an in-depth study of how to improve productivity at the workplace, we’ve concluded that increasing growth is the main concern of almost all businesses. If you want to amplify the growth and productivity of your business, then you should practice the abovementioned suggestion in your organization.
Ahsan Ali Shaw is an accomplished Business Writer, Analyst, and Public Speaker. Other than that, he’s a fun loving person.
