If you want your business to be a success, you need to make sure your employees are efficient with their time. The more time they waste, the less you can produce for your customers.
You aren’t immune from this happening in your business. Studies show that at least 31% of people waste at least 1 hour every day when they’re working.
Are you wondering why your team isn’t being productive? Before blaming them, start by examining the way you act as a manager. Keep reading to learn seven things you can do to improve productivity and efficiency at the workplace.
1. Give More Autonomy
People like to do good work and feel like they are good at their job. But sometimes it doesn’t seem like people know what they’re doing. This causes some managers to hover over their team and micromanage everything they do.
All this does is stress your team out.
Try to give your employees more control over what they work on and how they do their work. You don’t know the best way to do everything. Your employees can get better at their jobs and figure out new ways to do things when you let them figure things out for themselves.
Doing this will allow them to expand their abilities. When you have a team that can do more, you’re going to get better work done.
2. Offer Training and Advancement
People like to feel like they are making progress. If you have someone that’s been doing the same thing for a long time, the chances are they won’t feel challenged, or that they are making progress. You need a way to offer this feeling to your team.
To start, you can offer training programs for your employees. These programs should provide people with a way to learn new skills that help them advance in your company.
Once your employees have developed new skills, give them the chance to use them in new roles. Doing this will challenge them and help them feel like they are moving up and making progress.
3. Nail Your Communication
In a perfect world, everyone would always tell you when issues happen. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen much of the time.
When you’re the boss, it can be hard for people to reach out to you with problems. You need to make sure that they know they can reach out when something happens.
The less time your team spends dealing with issues, the more work they will get done. If you have people who don’t reach out when problems come up, sit down with them to figure out the problem. When you make yourself more available to people, they will feel less friction when talking with you.
4. Use Collaboration Tools
Email is great, but it isn’t the best for managing your team and projects. It’s easy to become disorganized and lose information. You need to use collaboration tools that make your life easier.
The first of those is project management. An online project management program will give you a central location online to keep track of everything going on. You can keep track of tasks and assign people to them. Nowadays PM tools are pretty commonly used and there are also tailored solutions, depending on your niche. For example, you can use event rental software to simplify and stay on top of your rental business.
Everyone should always know what they should be working on.
The next is file sharing. Online document collaboration tools like Google Drive and Office 365 allows everyone to see the current version of documents. You won’t need to email everyone when an update is made anymore.
5. Reduce Interruptions
Studies show that the typical worker is interrupted every three minutes. These interruptions can be because of a new email, phone calls, being tapped on the shoulder, hearing someone start playing music down the hall, etc.
Every time this happens, your brain has to switch tasks. The problem is that it takes time to focus on what you’re doing again. This leads to a lot of lost productivity.
You can combat this by encouraging your team to create time where the things that distract them are turned off. They should close their email, silence their phone, and put on headphones to tell people that they shouldn’t be interrupted.
Of course, some businesses can’t get away with doing this. You may have to have people monitoring email and phones for calls. If you’re in this situation, try to create a schedule during the day for people.
Give some people some quiet time while someone else manages external communication. You can then have your team switch positions later in the day.
6. Reward Good Work
It’s hard to get excited to do a job if you don’t believe your work matters at the end of the day. You can’t expect your team to know all the ways their work matters. It’s up to you to show them it does.
You can do this by rewarding people when they do a good job. It can be anything from a free lunch to tickets for the next sporting event.
You don’t have to stick with the regular employee perks, either. Look for more creative employee appreciation ideas. Something unique can go a long way.
7. Automate As Much As You Can
How much time do you think your employees spend on doing the same, repetitive tasks every day? The chances are it’s a lot.
The good news is technology can help. You can likely find a way to automate most of these tasks.
For instance, take someone generating a daily report. You have to log into your reporting software, select a few fields, create the report, and send it to the people who need it.
This process doesn’t take long. But over time it adds up to a lot of time.
You can use software to automate this entire process and send the report by email every day. Automating small things like this can add up to a lot of saved time.
Always Look for Ways to Improve Productivity and Efficiency
An office is only as good as the person who runs it. If you don’t look for ways to improve the productivity and efficiency of your workers, don’t be surprised if they aren’t effective. Use the tips above to get started.
Do you want to learn more tips about managing your team? Head to our business section to learn what your other options are.
