How To Increase Your Company’s Productivity

Successfully running a business is no easy task. Sometimes it can seem like a struggle just to stay in the black. This may even be the case if you have an excellent product that consumers want. If that is the case, there may be certain things holding you back. It could all boil down to a lack of productivity among your workforce.

Lack of strong productivity can certainly be a drain on your finances and present a significant long-term threat to the survival of your company. If you want to prevent this problem from becoming a serious issue, you should begin instituting policies in your workplace to make it more conducive to high productivity. Below are some steps you should consider taking.

Provide Direct Supervision

It’s a simple fact. Employees can’t be trusted to be productive on their own. It’s in human nature to only work hard when there is some perceived benefit. If employees don’t think they will ever be held accountable for slacking off at work, they will certainly take advantage of the situation. Researchers have calculated that employees spend 34 to 50 minutes slacking off at work.

Make sure employees do feel they are supervised while on the job. As the business owner, you probably can’t be present at all times with those below you in the company. Take the initiative to delegate responsibility to managers you can trust to provide that needed supervision to maintain a productive workplace.

Perform a Productivity Audit

There may also be other things that are hampering your business’s productivity that you may not be aware of. It may, for example, be the design of employee workstations or a factory assembly line. If these are designed poorly in the context of the layout of your building, it could be forming bottlenecks in production that are creating an impediment to an efficient workflow environment.

While this may be the case, you may need an independent third party with a keen eye to spot such issues. You may have an unconscious bias that prevents you from identifying these problems on your own. This is a good argument for hiring a third party to perform a productivity audit. You can use the results of such an audit to redesign the layout of your employees’ workplace to maximize efficiency and productivity. Adding more light to a workplace, for example, can increase productivity by as much as 16 percent.

Focus on Employee Engagement

Also, try to institute policies at work that increase the engagement of your employees with their work. Workplaces that have highly engaged employees were shown to have revenue growth 2.3 times higher than competitors without as much engagement.

There are many ways you can increase engagement in your workplace. This can include giving your employees better tools to complete their work. It can include recognizing employee achievement and helping to coach them in the workplace. Overall, track engagement and try to improve it where you can.

“Track employee skills utilization

Utilizing the right skills on the hours available is critical to quality output. For one, your employees’ bandwidth is put to optimal use. And for another,  no worker is benched for an unnecessarily long duration.

Besides staffing different types of ongoing as well as planned activities, a resource management software lets you track the usage of existent, available and relevant skills. This plays a vital role in deciding how best employees can be moved around in line with the work to be accommodated.

The ability to track skills utilization with a tool lets you know if any skilled employee is being over or under utilized. This way, your employees’ secondary skills are allocated onto those projects that are running low on all the right competencies.  More importantly, by tracking how active skills are utilized, you can plan better for future projects and in turn, improve organization-wide productivity.”

Set Clear Goals

Lastly, you should set very clear goals for employees to achieve. It’s a demonstrable fact that employees will work harder when they have a specific goal in mind. This goal could be meeting a sales quota for the month. It could also be the completion of a specific project such as a marketing campaign. Overall, there needs to actually be a goal. If there is no goal, employees will not have the ambition to be as productive as they would otherwise.

Whether or not a goal is met should also be discernible. Whether a goal of adding 50 new accounts has been achieved or not can certainly be determined. Something that cannot be measured will not work nearly as well.

Productivity is vitally important to the health of a business. Without it, you will slowly bleed profits until your company’s eventual demise. Do what you can to create a workplace that is conducive to high productivity. Your revenues are sure to increase as a result.