8 Effective Ways to Increase Employee Productivity
Focusing on employee productivity is important for business growth. Learn helpful tips below.
Employee productivity is a crucial metric for business success. But more than something you should aim to increase arbitrarily, it’s more effective to think of employee productivity as a rating for how well you’ve managed your company.
The more productive your employees are, the better your business is as a place to work – and poor productivity is often more an indictment of the organization and management of a company than it is of its workers.
Increasing your productivity as a business means making the company a better place to work in – and here are a few simple tips.
1. Create a Professional and Positive Working Environment
Yes, sometimes that means outing employees for doing the wrong thing, even if it’s “snitching”. Tolerating a toxic work environment is effectively endorsing toxicity, and can create a progressively hostile environment, especially for women and LGBTQ+ employees.
Diversity training and sexual harassment seminars aren’t enough – the most powerful thing you can do to foster a positive working environment in your company is to have a zero-tolerance policy towards harassment, overreaching personal boundaries, and abuses of power.
A positive and professional workplace and a culture that embraces fair and equal treatment can not only help you improve your reputation in the hiring department, but help everyone at your company feel included, welcomed, and safe.
2. Listen To Your Employees
Communication is both central to good management, and effectively serves as a cheat code to improving your managerial style. Want to help address issues that dampen employee productivity? Listen to what employees have to say.
Addressing workplace toxicity, removing agitators, improving education and career options, promoting ingenuity and cooperation, and providing perks such as better breaks and certain crucial amenities can go a long way toward making your employees happier -and in turn, making them more productive.
3. Incentivize Continued Education and Subsidize Training
Learning opportunities are more valuable than a small bump in pay. While employees want to be paid what they’re worth, there’s a certain point at which point extra money becomes less powerful as an incentive for productivity than the opportunity for status, notoriety within the business, or self-improvement through a new challenge or chance at a greater qualification.
4. Provide Better Opportunities for Remote Work
COVID forced many businesses to open the door to remote work alternatives, and while a return to the office has spelled the end of many of these policies, there are still plenty of workers who enjoyed working from home and did so effectively.
Enable these workers to continue working from home and encourage anyone else who wishes to intersperse office days with home office days to do so. This can help improve worker productivity and frees up space within the office while minimizing your business’ carbon footprint.
5. Utilize a Coworking Space
Coworking spaces are an ideal alternative to commercial real estate for companies that cannot afford to lease a space of their own but need an office environment to get started. Nearby coworking spaces are also an effective alternative for employees who cannot commute to the office but cannot remain productive at home.
These spaces offer the amenities and perks of a high-tech professional office setting at a fraction of the cost of a traditional commercial lease, without the headache that comes from furnishing and decorating your own space.
Furthermore, research shows that people become more productive and are happier in coworking spaces, due to the networking and cooperative opportunities that present itself when working in tandem with a larger professional community.
6. Subsidize a Nearby Gym Membership
Amenities like gym memberships make for a good hiring incentive, but they can also help you improve your business’ productivity by promoting a healthier lifestyle among your employees, through two different avenues:
- Encouraging your employees to exercise means providing them with a schedule that makes exercising possible. This avoids overly long hours and crunch time, and helps your employees stay sharp at work and cuts down on the risk of burnout.
- Regular exercise boosts mental faculties and concentration and can lead to more productivity at work. Your employees will be able to get more done, with fewer hours, while spending those extra hours improving their health and longevity.
And finally, exercise helps promote and improve mood, and happier people are better workers.
7. The Right Tools Go a Long Way
Buy that development suite. Get that high-quality emulator for mobile web development. Invest in that video editing software. Hire the best and most experienced people for the job, and then ask them what tools they need to get the job done as effectively as possible.
There’s no point in saddling a talented software engineer or developer with a subpar set of development tools, just as it would be cruel to present your video editor and graphics artist with a workstation that lacks a current gen dedicated graphics processor or runs on a Pentium core.
8. Company Retreats and Vacations Help
It may be a while before your business can afford to do so, but another way to boost morale, improve your company culture, and help everyone enjoy extra productivity is by sponsoring a little company retreat.
You don’t need a trip to the Alps – a local hike, a day at the beach, or even a company-sponsored trip to a local convention that everyone’s interested in can become a memorable event for years to come, and one that helps cement both professional and personal relationships throughout the office.
It can also be an opportunity for everyone to socialize outside of a work setting, including people who spend most of their time working for the company remotely, but who might be in the area.
Employee Productivity Conclusion
There are a million other ways to boost productivity both immediately and in the long run throughout your business. But the key to all these tips is to ultimately pay attention to what your workers need.
Listen to their requests and complaints, foster a healthy work environment, watch for inefficiencies and problems in the chain of production, sort out ways in which you can improve productivity by helping workers rather than micromanaging their hours, and make the most of their talents rather than resorting to crunch to make tight deadlines.