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As a business owner or manager, you want your employees to be as productive as possible. Productive employees produce more and are happier and more loyal to the company and its goals. However, the issue of employee productivity is a tricky one that businesses have been trying to solve for decades. Here are some ways that can help your business end up with more productive employees.
Start Things Off Right With Better Recruitment
Recruitment is a tricky thing – you have to make sure that you don’t accidentally screen out good candidates without letting in any bad ones. Review your screening process and make sure that the employees you recruit have the right skills and experience to do their jobs well and be productive. Over-qualified employees might feel like their skills are wasted on the role and may become bored and unproductive. Under-qualified employees will not be able to do all aspects of their job and will lack confidence.
Each company has a unique culture, so employees will need to feel comfortable and motivated in order for them to work better. Recruiting an employee that does not fit your company culture ideas may leave that employee feeling isolated and disengaged, while also negatively affecting their colleagues. Meanwhile, a new recruit that fits in with the rest of the team will feel happy and part of a team and will spur on your existing employees.
Use Training To Improve Employees
Training employees not only makes them better at their jobs and able to produce more through their wider variety of skills, but it also makes them feel more valuable. Trained up and developed employees will feel that the company is investing in them for the long term and will feel more secure in their jobs. Studies have shown that employees who receive training on the job will perform better.
Show Them You Care About Their Well Being
Employees are humans, and humans don’t always operate at peak performance. Medical check-ups and regular tests will highlight any medical problems in the blood or other parts of the body. A blood test can give early warning about a number of medical issues. Healthy employees are not only more productive because they aren’t sick, but they also feel that their employer is looking after them and will feel greater loyalty. Providing healthy snacks, offering exercise sessions and improving the air quality in your office will do wonders for employee health and mental well being and will, in turn, improve their productivity.
Make it clear to your employees that you care about their mental health. The global economy loses an estimated $1 trillion annually to mental health-related problems. Start an employee wellness program and let employees know that they can come to you if they have any mental issues that are affecting their lives. Depression, anxiety and other mental health issues can destroy lives, and as their employer or manager, you have a duty to help keep employee mental health in the best condition possible.
Stop Micromanaging
This is something that many managers are guilty of, and it can have a really negative effect on employee productivity. Firstly, if you keep butting in to check their work, then you are going to break their concentration and flow, reducing the amount of work they can get done. Secondly, people are the best judges of how they manage their time and work throughout the day, so if you come in and tell them to work differently, they may not be as productive.
Thirdly, the more you micromanage their work, the less confident in their abilities they will be and the more they will think that you do not trust them to do their jobs. This will lead to resentment and less productivity. You and your other managers should consider backing off a bit.
Be Flexible
Life is complicated, and your employees are not always going to appreciate the steady 9-5 working hours that you offer. Things come up in life that an overly rigid working structure can get in the way of. Let your employees who are also parents do the school run sometimes and then let them catch up on their work at home. If employees need to stay at home to figure out some issues with their landlord, then let them work from home and don’t make them use some of their holidays.
The internet and apps like Google Drive and Slack mean that it’s now easy for employees to work remotely. Employees who are happy that they can sort out the non-working parts of their lives will be more focused while they are at work. There are a number of ways to help improve employee productivity. By keeping some of the above tips in mind, you’ll soon have a workplace bustling with efficiency.
