Any leader wants to see a workplace brimming with productivity and a team that’s fully engaged.
But the traditional method of imposing strict deadlines, regular evaluations, and limited collaboration is ineffective in today’s environment. A high level of performance simply can’t be squeezed out of living human beings, after all.
All businesses should be attempting to boost productivity in their business, as they’ll never manage to get to a stopping point in this regard. This doesn’t mean overworking your employees, more that you should be looking at making their job easier so that they can get more important tasks done.
Promote A Collaborative Environment
If you’re looking to effectively improve productivity levels within your business, then you can’t go wrong by looking at the actual working conditions. This doesn’t mean physically, although that could help, but more on the work environment.
You should be looking to build a collaborative work environment, as collaboration is a key factor in the way that people work. Employees thrive in environments that allow them to communicate with each other easily and promote working together. Employees will feel as if they are a part of something bigger than themselves, and feel equipped to escalate the business into the clouds.
Collaboration doesn’t just put a group of people together to complete tasks; it’s more than that. They should be able to achieve a common goal by sharing valuable ideas, building trust and camaraderie among each other, and innovating together. The result is a product or a project that hits and goes beyond expectations.
One way to achieve excellent team collaboration is to create an efficient schedule that ensures prompt meetings among team members. Doing this in a big organization with hundreds of employees might be daunting. But scheduling software can quickly help you solve this. With a tool like this, conflicts on the project can be minimized.
Automate Daily Tasks
If your employees are coming into work and doing the same daily time-consuming tasks, then it’s likely to demotivate them and waste time that could otherwise be more productive. You’ll find that there is a technology that you could implement, that aims to do these daily tasks on your behalf.
It’s best to speak to your employees to find out what tasks these could be. It could be having to log into everything each day, or something more concrete like counting stock every day. When this time has been saved, they’ll be productive elsewhere.
Automating tasks will not only increase your team member satisfaction but also prove cost-effective for your business operations. It will reduce errors, increase speed and productivity, and create more satisfying transactions.
Implement A VoIP System
Something that could play a major role in overhauling your business and leading to more productivity, is implementing a VoIP system. If you didn’t know, this is essentially a piece of technology that allows you to make regular phone calls of any sort over the internet, rather than a traditional analog phone line. It works by converting your analog voice signals into digital signals and will run off of a VoIP server, connecting networks.
As you can imagine, this will benefit your business in several ways. It will save you costs, as phone lines and bills can be expensive at a per-call rate. It is also more reliable and allows for employees to use headphones and clear mics, improving the quality of the sound and voice in general.
Traditionally, the best place to go for your VoIP needs was Vonage. However, there are Vonage alternatives that can offer you more, depending on what you’re looking for. It could save you on costs, as well as offer your business more unique services that suit you. Whether you’re a small or big business, there will usually be something you need that is different from businesses like you, as all businesses operate differently.
You’ll find that employees will prefer working with a VoIP system, as it allows them to do their job more efficiently, removing stress and pressure from their daily tasks. It will also be beneficial for inner communications, as they can more easily communicate with each other at the press of a button.
Improve Project Management Systems
All businesses will delegate employees to work on various projects throughout the organization, whether it’s something that will benefit the business internally or externally, it will serve as an important process. If a project is mismanaged, it can lead to employees working on the same task, even if one task has been completed already.
This would leave an entire task needing doing, which can delay the project from being completed, as confusion will happen and people will have wasted time. Not only will they have wasted time, but they will also feel annoyed at the situation, which can cause productivity to slow down in the future.
It’s also possible that you have a different vision of what this project was supposed to be, but due to poor project management, it was never made clear. This is one of the reasons you should look to implement project management techniques, as it can help make clear what the end goal should be, as well as who should be working on what.
If you so wished, you could also plan little goals and due dates for smaller tasks along the way, which can help make clear when everything should be done by, to help prioritize certain tasks over non-essential ones. There will be a lot more you can implement too, depending on the sort of project you’re working on. You’ll find employees who know what they need to do, will be more productive when working.
Automate Time Tracking And Pay Slips
For similar reasons as outlined above, employees who don’t have to worry about clocking in and out for their hours will feel more relieved and less stressed about it being wrong. If an employee forgets to clock in, this can disrupt the system, and lead to questions having to be asked to resolve an issue.
From an HR perspective, they will be greatly relieved by not having to manually go through each employee’s information, and audit time entries and make corrections. Automating time tracking and pay slips through technology will allow employees to feel satisfied with how much they work and how much they’re paid, as well as give everyone in the business a bit of a breather.
Your team won’t have to create lengthy incident reports for a few minutes of unrecorded time entry since this technology lets you get to the point much more quickly. Keeping records clear will no longer be a fuss.
More importantly, you can ensure you pay each team member up to the last dollar. That plays a huge part in maintaining overall work satisfaction, something many businesses overlook nowadays.
Remove Focus On Manual File Sharing
File sharing is something that is becoming more and more important for businesses. It allows them to instantly share documents and links with those within your organization, saving time on doing that in person or sending it via other ways.
The way you operate now may mean that you need to wait for a colleague to send you or an employee a file, which can be disastrous if they’re out of work or busy. If you make it so that files can be instantly accessed by employees without the need to do it manually, then this will save your business major time.
Certain applications make this easier for you, showing you who has accessed a document, who has made edits to it and even tracking the history of changes, allowing you to restore previous versions if a mistake was made. This improves communication within the business and will lead to less downtime and waiting, increasing productivity.
