About 60% of the workday is spent on something productive. Imagine how strong your workforce would be if only employees worked the other 40%.
Improving business productivity is a mystery for many businesses. Managers want to make the most of employees’ time, but they find that they’re continuously struggling to do so.
How can you take the mystery out of productivity and limit activities that waste time all day long?
Read on to find out.
Contents
1. Empower Your Employees
How much time is wasted at your business because an employee is waiting for a decision or an answer to move forward on a project?
Empowering your employees to make decisions shows that you trust them. They feel valued, and they are more willing to perform at a higher level.
When you empower employees to make decisions, they can move forward more quickly. That can also impact your customers, too.
You might have a customer service team to get approval for every single refund. Customers have to wait, and your employees can’t serve your customers effectively.
However, if you make a policy to allow your employees to offer refunds to customers up to $200, they can serve more customers and keep your customers happy.
2. Leverage Technology
Technology in the workplace can be a blessing and a curse. You rely on it for most of your business functions, but it can be a burden if your IT approach is to apply quick fixes to every problem.
You end up with a maze of different types of systems that don’t work together, instead of systems being integrated to make your life easier.
IT consulting services can help you make sense of all of your systems. You also lower your downtime, which impacts productivity.
You’ll end up with only the systems you need. Those systems will be more secure and more efficient.
3. Measure Results and Adjust Accordingly
How do you know if your employees are being productive? Traditionally, productivity is measured by outputs and inputs to deliver a product or service.
For example, your team took 1,200 hours to produce $100,000 worth of goods and services. If the inputs outweigh the outputs by a large margin, then your team isn’t being productive. You might set a goal to lower the work hours to produce 1,000 hours to produce $100,000 of goods.
That method of measuring productivity might not always work for your business. The metrics you use to measure productivity should be aligned with your business goals.
Once your team understands the business goals, they can develop personal goals towards that objective.
4. Learn to Say No
Employees tend to feel overwhelmed because they take on too much work. They can’t seem to say no to projects or opportunities.
What ends up happening is that those employees cause a bottleneck. They have so much to do that they can’t get everything done. That has a trickle-down effect throughout your company.
You need to create a culture where it’s OK to say no to projects. Tell employees that they have leeway to turn down projects, but they also have to do their fair share of work.
5. Limit Meetings
A study from MIT showed that executives who work for 45 years spend about 22 years in meetings.
Most of those meetings are a complete waste of time. You and your team need to be proactive and intentional about every single meeting.
Set a policy about meetings in your workplace. Every meeting has to have a purpose, time limit, and agenda. It’s also helpful to assign one person to be in control of the meeting. That person has to have a strong personality to keep the meeting on track.
It’s very easy for a meeting agenda to get derailed because an attendee goes off on an unrelated topic. Stick with the agenda, fulfill the purpose of the meeting, and move on.
Any topics that aren’t related should get tabled or discussed offline. That sense of purpose will help your team move through meetings fast, limit time-wasting, and improve business productivity.
6. Use Flexible Schedules
It used to be that your employees needed to be in the office for set hours during the day. With technological advances, that’s no longer the case.
This goes hand-in-hand with leveraging technology and empowering your employees. Your business has access to technological tools that make it easy to be able to work from anywhere.
You empower your employees when you treat them like adults. They’ve shown time and time again that they’re capable of getting the job done.
You can reward them by allowing them to work on flexible schedules. They will be relieved to know that they can take a self-care break or care for family members during the day.
If you do have a flexible schedule policy, you need to set clear expectations with your employees. They can’t bail on meetings or miss deadlines. They need to be responsible for their work, or the policy gets revoked.
Improving Business Productivity Takes Work
Did you learn how to improve business productivity? These are just some of the new policies that you can implement for a more efficient workplace.
When you start to implement these changes, it’s best to take a slow and steady approach. Focus on one change at a time. That gives you and your team time and space to adjust to that change. You can then add the next change until your team is operating at a high level.
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