Believe it or not, for 46.9% of the time, our attention is almost non-existent. In this modern day and age, people simply have a real issue with focusing on important matters. With so many distractions around us, who could blame us? Nevertheless, in the last quarter of 2015, the US bureau of labor statistics reported an increase of 2.2% in employee productivity. How did they manage to do that? The answer is simple: companies have realized that there is a problem and they addressed it. And if you are looking for tips on how you can increase your employee productivity, here are a few that are proven to be effective.
Social Media Restrictions
In average, one out of eight of your employees is on Facebook right now. Social media has certainly become a sort of a standard when it comes to communications, and this is why the great number of us checks on twitter, Facebook and other apps every half an hour. Companies that do try to restrict the use of social media often get counterproductive results. Simply, just because you’ve forbidden someone to use Facebook at work, it doesn’t mean that he, or she, won’t think about it the entire day. Certain companies, like Adidas, have recognized this issue and have implemented great social media policies and great guidelines.
Establish a social media policy in your office as well. If you follow the example of Adidas, you can even get your employees to advocate for your company online and increase the overall productivity through social media.
Business Meetings
It is a well-known fact that our attention span is often limited to 15 minutes tops. Therefore, your business meetings shouldn’t last any longer than that period of time. This means that you will have to organize your meetings in a manner that will allow you to skim through important matters. Everything that you don’t concern valuable, every information that can wait and is not related to the subject of that exact meeting, can be delivered via email in the afterhours. You can also implement a daily virtual briefing and inform your team about the status through your collaboration platform.
Establish a 15 minute rule for every meeting that you have. Every meeting should be organized, measured, and focused on a particular topic. When you are writing the draft of your meeting, always leave some empty room for the questions that your employees might have.
Results Driven Workforce
Discuss employee productivity with your Human Resources department. If you have regular and automated reports, checking out on particular member of your team and his productivity should come easy. The best thing that you can do is compare his, or her, results on a monthly basis. If he is taking less time to perform tasks that he used to have to work significantly more for – that’s evidently a progress. Adopting, learning and applying should be the mantra of your team, and with that sort of systematization you will have no problems with creating a productive workforce.
Don’t keep this idea a secret. Involve your employees and encourage them to track their own time while they are working. Making a scalable model of this type of progress will help you focus your team as well.
Employee Assistance Counseling
If you want your workers to respect you and to deliver the very best that they can – show them that you believe in them. In case that one of your teammates starts being counterproductive, or if he/she has some issues that are keeping them from giving their best in the place of work – consider scheduling them for a counseling session. There are counseling companies specialized in this very field, like Sydney Counseling. Their employee assistance program will certainly help your worker with any issue that they might have. On the other hand, your employee will be grateful for your trust and concern.
Counseling is something that you should consider implementing in any case. Talking about work with a professional experienced in the field of helping people in becoming more productive will only be beneficial for your workforce and for your company.
At the very end, try to create a sense of home, a sense of family. Don’t be too strict but don’t be their pal either. Having a productive workforce certainly depends heavily on relationship that you are having with your employees, but that relationship shouldn’t be based on friendship, but respect.