As a manager or, alternatively, a small business owner, you will find yourself in a position in which you will need to squeeze the maximum output out of your employees without sacrificing their well-being and work-life balances. This ensures that there is a positive corporate environment and, obviously, helps your business by improving productivity and revenue. This is a delicate process that requires skill and a little advice from industry professionals. Without further ado, here are some methods that you might consider implementing in order to increase company productivity.
Setting up internet filters in order to prevent time drainage on the part of the employees should be one of the easiest things to put into practice found on this list. This doesn’t mean that your workers are consciously trying to avoid doing work, but studies have shown that most people are not particularly good at estimating the passage of time so by doing this you will be minimising distractions with a minimum of effort.
You or your management team should be capable to provide meaningful feedback on the employees’ performance when the time is right. If people don’t understand what they’re doing wrong, they are far less likely to change their behaviour. Similarly, if they feel unappreciated and have no sense of the value they bring to a company, they will not be fully committed to the well-being of your business. Ideally, there should be some time and thought put into the feedback you give out.
Meetings should be kept at a minimum. Ideally, you would have a series of set events each week in order to discuss goals and progress up to that point and encourage people to limit the amount of additional meetings they set up. Studies show that they can very easily become a way of unknowingly wasting time and a lot of the tasks being discussed in additional events could be very easily solved through a phone call or an email.
This only applies if your team is constantly on the move, such as is the case if you’re managing a sales team across the country or something with a similar set up to that, but you should definitely consider the benefits of remote conference systems. Reducing the time taken up by your on-location team gathering every time you want to communicate something to them can be highly beneficial in the long run. Distributors, contractors and the like can be similarly contacted in a more efficient manner.
Always take the long-term view of things, even if it might lose you some time and resources in the short-term. So many employers keep things like worker training to a minimum, thinking that it is the smart thing to do when it comes to maximising revenue, when the truth is that a capable, motivated workforce will add a lot more than that in the future. This applies across the board. Investing money back into your company is a good thing and it should not be sacrificed in the interest of quick and easy gains that amount to nothing in the end.
Trevor McClintock Belfast 