Strategies to Improve Workforce Productivity in your Business
Workforce productivity is an important factor for a company's success. If your organization isn’t progressing towards improving productivity at work, many people would find it difficult to sustain in the environment.
Productivity can be challenging to achieve, especially now that workers are less receptive to old approaches. Thus, defining a framework for ensuring productivity is important.
Let’s look at some of the strategies that can help you achieve productivity at scale.
1. Alignment of Vision and Clear Goal Setting
Experiments carried out to determine the effect of goals on productivity found that explicit goal frameworks had a significant impact even without motivating people, raising performance by 12 to 15%.
Some reasons that support the idea that goals can improve productivity include:
- It gives them something to work towards in their jobs. The majority of the people in an organization work endlessly without any motivation. Setting a goal will not only propel them to work hard to achieve the goal but will make them work in a more regulated manner.
- It encourages people to go above and beyond the commitment. Setting a goal might be a great way to encourage people to do a bit more each day.
- It establishes a foundation for stimulating others. If you want to excite people with incentives and bonuses, or if you want to tie pay raises and promotions to performance, you'll need goals so that everyone knows what the bar is set at.
2. Employee Engagement to Cut the Monotony
Businesses with the most involved staff are 21 percent more lucrative than those with the least engaged workers, according to Gallup. Increased safety, client retention, and productivity are all advantages of employee involvement.
Ensure employees are engaged by:
- Fostering an inclusive workplace and a positive corporate culture
- Promoting feedback loops—don't just tell employees how they're doing; ask them to give honest feedback to peers and management in structured venues, and then follow up on it.
- Trying to create cohesive teams that work together to accomplish tasks and goals rather than working alone
3. Set up a Feedback Loop and Encourage Flextime
Have you ever considered that employees may not be working at their best because they are unsure of what it takes to put their best foot forward? With a proper feedback loop in place, you can effectively communicate the opportunity areas where one needs to work.Recognizing workers for high productivity or other positive performance serves two important purposes:
- It recognizes them for a job well done, increasing the possibility that they will do it again.
- It illustrates to others what optimal performance (and the benefits that come with it) looks like, making it more likely that additional employees will follow in the footsteps of top performers.
According to one study, employees who can work flexible schedules have higher productivity. Around 30% of survey participants said that having more flexibility in their schedules increased their productivity. Even more telling, according to a Cranfield University study, 90% of managers believe that flextime improves both productivity and quality of work.
One possible explanation for these findings is that people are genetically predisposed to be more productive at particular times. This is because everyone's circadian rhythms—natural physiological mechanisms that regulate sleep and energy levels—are unique.
4. Sturdy Framework to ensure Health and Wellness
In addition to many of the other strategies on this list that can help contribute to employee wellness, here are a few ideas for supporting it in your organization:- Exercise and Wellness programs: Employees can connect with gyms and other wellness providers, as well as services like counseling, through these programs, which may be offered as part of a benefits package or individually.
- Prioritize work/life balance: Create policies that allow workers to care for themselves and their families while also achieving professional success.
5. Revamp the Space and its Aesthetics
From lighting and color to the sounds of the workspace, the conditions people work in can impact overall productivity.A study indicated that the color of a space can impact quality and productivity. Some people didn’t work well in a red room as compared to a blue room.
You should pay attention to how various working conditions impact the average productivity of your teams. Some things you might want to test include:
- Sound: To uncover options that enhance productivity, talk to team members and try out different acoustic situations.
- Natural Light: Although adding light to the office is often beneficial, it is not always practicable. To find out what works best for teams, experiment with different types and amounts of light.
- Colors and Design: Create eye-pleasing surroundings, or at the very least workplaces that aren't harsh and distracting.
6. Understanding that Not One Size Fits All
By maximizing each person's natural abilities, experience, knowledge, and passion for the job, matching people to the correct jobs can boost productivity. This doesn't imply you have to recruit someone with a lot of experience for every job; there are instances when you'll need to hire someone with less experience and train them up. However, paying attention to overall fit has a positive impact on productivity at all levels. Here’s how you can achieve them:- Recognize the abilities and expertise that each individual brings to the table and how they apply to various roles in your company.
- To match employees to the correct chances, find out what their personal work goals and desires are.
- Re-evaluate your staff’s interest and inclination from time to time to determine when it's time to move people on to new opportunities.
7. Focus on Training and Upskilling
In a study of the relationship between training and worker performance, strong human resource management was found to be crucial from the start and throughout the training process.Spend some time developing a training strategy for your entire crew. Include an onboarding strategy that gets employees off to a good start, but don't forget about continuous training, mentoring, and development opportunities, as well as annual refresher and compliance training.