13 Tips for Improving Employee Productivity

You’ll find that Improving employee productivity is key to business growth, learn how to keep your employees happy with these tips.

Image Source: Pixabay

Every successful small business has a foundation of hard working employees that helped drive success. As a small business owner it should be top priority to learn how to find the right employees for the job and then learn how to keep them happy to improve employee productivity.

Employee productivity is mainly about efficiency and effectiveness. Improved employee productivity is essential for every business because it drives progress. Its success depends on it. It also contributes to customer satisfaction, improving customer relationships. High engagement is a crucial aspect of workplace productivity; when employees are productive, they’re willing to participate in organizational activities and establish positive engagements with their colleagues. When your team is productive, they work well together over the long term, maintaining a strong company culture.

Low employee productivity yields poor employee performance, negatively impacting deliverables quality. This may lead to end-user dissatisfaction and reduced profitability. Reduced employee productivity leads to disengagement and low team morale, affecting company progress and growth. It also causes underutilization of the workforce, affecting overall business performance.

This post is going to focus on tried and true tips for improving employee productivity.

1. Establish an employee mentorship program

Mentorship programs are essential for employee satisfaction and retention. They use existing resources and high-performing or senior employees to help under-performing, new, and less experienced employees to thrive and grow. Once the employees are trained, a mentorship program can help enhance job satisfaction, resulting in high productivity.

Mentorship helps attract new talent, enhance professional and career development, retain high performers, improve employee engagement, and promote an inclusive and diverse workplace. Investing in mentoring software can help you easily design, implement, manage, and evaluate your mentoring program. It also allows you to match mentors and mentees, schedule sessions, and track progress, ensuring success. 

2. Invest in employee training and development

Improving employee productivity requires a bit of training and nurturing. Investing in employee training programs expands their knowledge base to benefit your organization. You can provide them with mentoring programs, training materials, courses, examinations, and more. A training program allows you to strengthen your employees’ weak skills, while a development program elevates their skills and knowledge to match the rest.

This results in collaborative teams where employees can work in a group or independently without constantly seeking help or requiring supervision. Training and development programs also improve employee performance, job satisfaction and reduce employee turnover rates.

3. Provide your employees with technology

Improving employee productivity means making sure that your employees have the equipment that they need. Investing in modern technology increases workplace efficiency and productivity. Technology allows the management to leverage online organizational and productivity tools to track the time, manage projects and monitor progress towards organizational goals. Using technology, you can streamline complex processes and workflows. Its features ease repetitive, time-consuming tasks such as data collection and sorting or bill payments, increasing productivity and reducing human error chances.

Tracking and analyzing employee performance pushes them to work harder, increasing productivity. The use of technology increases flexibility and makes it easy for remote teams to collaborate, ensuring timely project completion. With modern tools and technologies, employees can provide more personalized customer service, increasing customer satisfaction, and profitability.

4. Assign tasks based on relevant skills

When assigning project tasks and responsibilities, it’s essential to consider each employee’s skills to ensure project efficiency. To assign tasks depending on skill sets, evaluate each of your employee’s strengths and focus on building on them. Taking advantage of employee strengths ensures they’re more engaged in their work, improving performance and productivity.

Consider hands-on training for new hires to identify their strengths. Be sure to leverage reverse mentorships where employees have equal responsibilities and respect for each other’s strengths. Providing regular feedback to your employees keeps them motivated and engaged, improving performance and productivity.

5. Effective employee onboarding

Employee onboarding directly impacts productivity and engagement. Take time to build an effective onboarding process and implement it in phases. Get the new hire’s workstation ready in advance and ensure they have access to all the necessary tools and technologies. Set enough time for training and let them know of your expectations, rules, processes, and procedures.

You can also create an orientation program, consider peer mentorship, and adopt remote onboarding procedures. The effectiveness of your employee onboarding process impacts productivity and the employee’s performance, and long-term growth.

6. Set specific goals expectations

Setting specific goals is a technique that managers can leverage to increase productivity and benefit your business in various ways. Goal setting acts as a constant source of motivation to achieve your objectives. It provides a tracking system and a way to maintain a record of your success and achievements. Goals help workers to discover self-confidence and motivation, sustaining and engaging them over long periods.

Set performance goals because they link directly to your big business goals. Communicating your goals and objectives keeps your employees dedicated and focused on achieving them, improving performance and productivity.

7. Ensure effective communication

Effective communication, including clear instructions, proper explanation, and quick message delivery, is essential to increasing productivity as it influences employee performance and behavior. Effective communication increases productivity by at least 20%. Practice communicating with your employees for better understanding, increasing efficiency and productivity. Effective communication empowers employees and enhances transparency.

A transparent workplace eliminates room for misunderstandings, ensuring less friction and more collaboration. A healthy, productive environment promotes healthy working relationships between the management and employees, keeping them engaged and committed to working towards your company’s mission. With an excellent company communication culture, employees are more likely to keep each other accountable, increasing productivity and propelling the company towards growth and success.

8. Incentivize your employees

Improving employee productivity means providing incentives and making sure that your employees have something to look forward to. Rewarding your staff for doing their jobs right makes them feel appreciated and motivates them to work harder and become even more productive. This also pushes other employees to work hard, improving productivity. Consider establishing recognition and rewards programs to encourage employees to do better each day. 

While celebrating significant achievements is essential, appreciate even the small wins as your employees contribute to larger milestones. Teamwork magnifies individual productivity, so consider incentivizing the most productive and engaging teams. You can give them handwritten gratitude notes, paid leave, free access to wellness programs, flexible work hours, and more.

9. Avoid employee micromanagement

Micromanaging your employees limits their freedom to work as they should and makes them feel suffocated, impacting employee retention. Managers are expected to offer correction and guidance whenever necessary. However, getting too involved in their work erodes their productive time, reducing productivity. Micromanaging employees stops them from showcasing their potential and aptitude, robbing them of the desire to prove their capabilities.

Avoid micromanaging your employees and give them room to display their potential. Showing that you believe in their capabilities pushes them to work harder and gives them the freedom to become creative and innovative. It also causes your staff to eventually lose their drive and enthusiasm, causing disengagement and resulting in low productivity, reduced performance, and low employee morale.

10. Provide employee support

Attaining high levels of employee productivity is only possible if the management supports them unconditionally. While it’s common for issues to crop up when working, getting them resolved as soon as possible allows them to focus on achieving your company goals and objectives. Consider providing a modern service desk where your staff can find quick, personalized solutions for any challenges they may encounter, making them focus on what is required of them and improving productivity.

11. Emphasize company culture

Company culture involves a combination of policies, goals, practices, and values and directly connects with productivity. When you provide a quality working environment for your staff, their energy, attention, and interests are invested into meeting company goals. This results in improved performances, more productivity, and workplace accountability. Providing an excellent work-life balance, employees focus more on their work, increasing business success and leading to increased employee engagement and retention.

Developing and maintaining positive company culture and a healthy, productive environment is a continuous process that could affect employee and overall company productivity if ignored.

12. Don’t overwork your employees

Overworking lowers employee productivity levels, negatively affecting your business. Besides reducing productivity, overworking your employees reduces employee performance, reducing overall business performance. When some of your employees overwork themselves regularly, you may be tempted to set unrealistic deadlines and expectations that may be difficult to meet.

While you may expect this to improve your business, it can negatively impact their physical and mental health, reducing productivity and negatively impacting overall company success. Avoid overworking your employees as this could negatively impact their productivity. Track your teams’ working hours to ensure they don’t overwork and give them enough time to rest and rejuvenate for improved focus and productivity.

13. Provide constructive feedback

Improving employee productivity means providing constructive feedback. The right kind of feedback is one of the most significant things you can offer your employees, as it contributes to their performance and success and your business’s growth and success. Giving feedback to your employees allows them to improve their performance to meet the company’s standards. It also gives you a chance to communicate your expectations clearly to ensure employees know what the job requires of them.

Constructive, positive feedback builds employee confidence in their duties and position, improving performance. When you give feedback to your employees, they feel supported in their roles, promoting employee loyalty and retention. To provide effective feedback to your employees:

• Time it for the two of you are in the right mindset and prepare the right approach
• Give examples for workers to understand what they did wrong to improve accordingly
• Ensure your feedback is genuine and actionable

Endnote

Improving employee productivity will set your business on the path to growth and success. Not many businesses make it very far without a strong focus on their employees. Consider implementing these tips to improve staff productivity.